The subject of Lewis’ latest book, The Undoing Project, is the pair whose intellectual collaboration produced the once and sometimes still radical ideas about the highly irrational modus operandi of the human brain which underpins the school of thought known as behavioral economics: the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Imagine my excitement, then, when I learned that Lewis was writing a book about two heroes of social psychology whose impact has been profound and whose ideas are continuing to become more influential year by year. Simply Google “Moneyball for” to see lots of examples.Īs a tale of triumphant vanquishing of irrationality, Moneyball appealed to the same part of my personality that led me to study psychology and become a researcher. People have taken to marketing their solutions to various problems as “Moneyball for” ( insert domain here, e.g. In fact, the word Moneyball has become synonymous with applying analytical rigor to exploit market inefficiencies. The influence of Moneyball has been felt far beyond the world of sports. Despite a monumental spending disadvantage, Beane outfoxes the competition and achieves remarkable success by snagging value players who don’t pass the traditional eye test for what a future baseball star should look like but who excel on previously unrecognized yet important performance metrics. Lewis’ most influential work, Moneyball, chronicles the nonconformist approach to professional baseball talent evaluation employed by general manager Billy Beane of the small-market Oakland Athletics. Aside from finance, Lewis’ other main subject matter has been professional sports, or rather the use of unconventional management strategies, guided by increasingly complex use of quantitative analysis, to gain a competitive advantage in that sphere.
He made his name with Liar’s Poker, helping a lay audience understand questionable securities practices and the 1980s Wall Street culture that enabled them (followed by expositions of 2000s Wall Street in The Big Short and Flash Boys).
Michael Lewis is known for successfully taking complex quantitative subjects and writing about them in a way that makes them accessible, and thus interesting, to non-experts.
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