"Some people were better than others," Kahneman described what he learned from his parents, "but the best were far from perfect and no one was simply bad." Instead they developed an appreciation of human complexity, even a love for it. These men grew up under conditions that might have led them to divide the world into black and white, good and evil, but this did not happen. Tversky, born in Haifa in 1937, earned, at the age of nineteen, Israel's highest military decoration, for rescuing a fellow soldier from an exploding device, in the process injuring himself. Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and raised in Paris his family decided to remain in France after the Nazis took over the country, and then to rely on business connections to spring his father from the death camps, and then to move to Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel. Both had good reason to become fascinated with how human beings make decisions. For one thing, the thinkers who launched them - Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - seemed to be geniuses of some sort. The rapid spread of their ideas throughout so much of academia did not bode well for the future.Īnd so I was heartened by the first sustained attacks on neoclassical economics. Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman had always seemed to me to be marginal and somewhat bizarre thinkers, especially when compared to such intellectual titans as John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. When Chicago-style economists started to apply their methods to other social science disciplines, and then to virtually all the perplexities of human life, the charge of academic imperialism could be added. Also the jargon grew impenetrable, and the mathematics ostentatious and obnoxious. Their relentless advocacy of market-based public policies was finally ideological - and, by my lights, ideologically wrong. Neoclassical economists had insisted upon the primacy of self- interest only in order to model human behavior, but the way rational choice theory developed (at the University of Chicago in particular) suggested that self-interest was not just a fact for these thinkers, but also an ideal: not just how people do act but also how they should act. As far as I was concerned, it could not happen fast enough. Frey, professor of economics at the University of Zurich, calls the "revolution" in his discipline, my reaction was one of delight. When I first began hearing about what Bruno S. Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (Munich Lectures in Economics) by Bruno S.
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