Thinking, Fast and Slow

What this book is, and who it's for

Daniel Kahneman's 2011 career-summary volume distills four decades of research that won him the Nobel Prize in Economics — research that almost single-handedly created the field of behavioral economics. The two-system frame (System 1: fast, automatic, error-prone; System 2: slow, effortful, lazy) is now lingua franca for talking about decisions. The book is long and dense in spots but rewards the patience: every cognitive bias popularized in the last decade is in here, with the experiment that demonstrated it. Read this once and you'll recognize your own thinking errors in real time — which is the first step toward not making them.