27. Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It

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**SPEAKER_3** (0:59)
This episode of People I Mostly Admire was recorded in 2021 In this episode, Steve talks to the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who died in 2024
The circumstances of Kahneman's death are discussed in this week's episode of Freakonomics Radio, Who Gets to Choose a Good Death, number 678 Thanks for listening.

**Steve Levitt** (1:22)
Danny Kahneman is an intellectual giant. Trained as a psychologist and not an economist, he nonetheless received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. But a Nobel Prize doesn't begin to capture Danny's influence. Within academics, a scholar's impact is measured by citations. The number of times other research articles refer to one scholarship. Incredibly, of all the research papers ever written in the social sciences, Danny and his co-author Amos Tversky have written not just one, but two of the 10 most cited articles of all time.
I've had a pretty successful career in academics, but Danny has 26 papers that have more citations than my most heavily cited paper.
He proved he could connect with a popular audience as well. His 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, was a blockbuster bestseller.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:16)
Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

**Steve Levitt** (2:25)
I met Danny Kahneman for the first time in 2009 I was in New York City shortly after the release of Super Freakonomics, the follow-up to Freakonomics. And that book was proving to be quite controversial because of a chapter we had written on climate change. Anyway, I was eating dinner in a New York City restaurant and completely by chance Danny happened to be also dining there. A mutual friend introduced us, and I was shocked when Danny mentioned offhandedly that he had actually just been reading Super Freakonomics. I asked him what he thought of it. He replied, I think it will change the course of mankind. I couldn't believe it. One of the world's greatest thinkers thought my work was changing the course of mankind. But Danny wasn't finished. After a brief pause, he continued, I think your book will change the course of mankind and not for the better. Well, it turns out Danny didn't much like our climate change chapter either. But I was still flattered that he thought my book might matter enough that it could cause the downfall of humanity.
From that rather inauspicious beginning, somehow Danny and I eventually grew to be friends and later business partners in a little consulting company we called The Greatest Good.
At that company, we tried to make the world a little better place by applying cutting edge ideas in economics, but we discovered it wasn't so easy to get people to pay us to do that. So we closed that company a few years back and since then I've seen a lot less of Danny than I'd like.
Danny, it's so great to talk with you again. It's been way too long, and I miss you.

**Daniel Kahneman** (4:01)
Neutral.

**Steve Levitt** (4:02)
So it's been roughly a decade since Thinking Fast and Slow was published. And even though that book turned out to be a massive bestseller, I still can't believe you wrote another book because I remember it practically killed you right in the last one. Wasn't it torture?

**Daniel Kahneman** (4:17)
Well, Thinking Fast and Slow was worse than this one because it was a lonely endeavor. This time I worked very closely with one of my collaborators, Olivier Cibouni. He is in Paris and we were on Zoom for an hour or two a day for the whole period.
Because of COVID, the virus helped us a lot. Previously, we had been meeting once a month for several days, and it turned out that Zoom was way more efficient.