Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, but his parents, Lithuanian Jews who had settled in France, raised him in Paris, where the family still was when the German occupation began in 1940. He spent the war years in hiding and on the move, a Jewish child who kept the yellow star tucked inside his sweater. He later described being stopped after curfew by an SS soldier who, instead of turning him in, showed him a photograph of his own son, gave him money, and sent him home, an encounter he said stayed with him as evidence that people are more complicated than any single story about them. The family reached Mandate Palestine after the war, and he studied psychology and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He served in the Israeli army after his degree, designing a personality-interview system still used decades later, then earned a doctorate at Berkeley in 1961. Starting in 1969 he began working with the psychologist Amos Tversky, and over the next decade the two of them mapped the specific, repeatable ways people misjudge probability and risk — anchoring, availability, the framing effects that became the foundation of what is now called behavioral economics. Kahneman had never taken an economics course, which made it all the stranger when he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 2002, psychology having no Nobel of its own to give him. Thinking, Fast and Slow, his 2011 book distilling the work for a general audience, sold millions of copies and made terms like loss aversion part of ordinary conversation.

The partnership with Tversky was the best work of Kahneman's life and, by his own account, also the hardest relationship in it. They worked so closely in the 1970s that colleagues called them one mind in two bodies, then drifted into competitiveness and disputes over credit after they took jobs at different universities, a strain that lasted until Tversky's death from cancer in 1996 without full repair. Kahneman married twice — his second wife was the cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman, who died in 2018 — and from 2020 lived with Barbara Tversky, Amos's widow. He described himself flatly as a worrier and not a jolly person, an odd self-portrait from the man who did more than anyone to explain what actually makes people happy.

Kahneman died on March 27, 2024, at 90, in Nunningen, Switzerland. It only became known a year later, when friends and family described it, that he had chosen an assisted death through the Swiss organization Pegasos, telling people close to him that he did not want to risk the dementia that had taken Anne Treisman's mind before it took her life. The field he helped invent has kept expanding without him, from economics into medicine, law and public policy, everywhere someone builds a system on the assumption that people reason correctly and needs reminding that they mostly do not.

Daniel Kahneman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases article
  With Amos Tversky — among the most cited papers in the social sciences 1974
• Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk article
  With Tversky, the basis of the Nobel citation 1979
• Structured personality-selection interview other
  Built for the Israeli army, still in use decades later 1955
• Thinking, Fast and Slow book
  Bestseller distilling four decades of research for a general audience 2011

• March 5, 1934 aged 0 Born in Tel Aviv
• 1940 aged ~6 The German occupation of Paris begins while his family is living there
• 1954 aged ~20 Earns his bachelor's degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• 1961 aged ~27 Completes his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley
• 1969 aged ~35 Begins his collaboration with Amos Tversky
• 1979 aged ~45 Publishes Prospect Theory with Tversky
• 1996 aged ~62 Tversky dies of cancer
• 2002 aged ~68 Wins the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
• March 27, 2024 aged 90 Dies in Nunningen, Switzerland

• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. awarded him the Medal of Freedom
• Paul Samuelson 1915–2009
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, whose textbook defined the field for decades. fellow Nobel economist, opposite generation
• Joseph Stiglitz b. 1943
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work on information asymmetries reshaped development economics. built on his behavioral critique
• Milton Friedman 1912–2006
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy. argued from the opposite economic tradition