Daniel Kahneman, as well as being a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, is one of the subjects, along with his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, of Michael Lewis’ latest book, “The Undoing Project”, and so his work has drawn even more attention as the way to see through biased behavior and show how irrational people are in the conduct of their everyday lives. I want to suggest that Kahneman is dead wrong on substance, that people are reasonable rather than overcome by bias, and his deeply mistaken supposition is the result of a method that boxes his subjects into corners so that they cannot but seem hopelessly irrational. This essay, reprinted from westendejournal.com is an attempt to bring down what has been offered up as an important icon of contemporary thinking about mental and social life.
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