I was saddened to hear that Daniel Kahneman passed away last week. Kahneman was a psychologist, but had a profound effect on economics, winning the Nobel Prize in 2002 "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty".
Kahneman's early work on decision-making, much of it with Amos Tversky, laid many of the foundations for what we now know as behavioural economics. In fact, such was the importance of his work that I replicate many of the key experiments early in my ECONS102 class each year. More recently, Kahneman made a number of contributions to our understanding of subjective wellbeing, or life satisfaction (see here, for example). He was clearly research active, and exploring new areas, right up until the end.
There are a number of good obituaries that summarise Kahneman's work, including at the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times. Daniel Read (University of Warwick) also wrote a great article on The Conversation, reflecting on interactions with Kahneman since Read was a student. I also highly recommend Michael Lewis' book The Undoing Project (which I reviewed here), which tries to capture the unique story of Kahneman and Tversky's friendship and work together.
Behavioural economics is still not embedded within the mainstream of economic theory, teaching, and research. It is clearly still a work in progress. When (or perhaps if) economic theory develops in such a way that the behavioural insights are captured within a core model of decision-making and behaviour, we will have Kahneman to thank for pointing the way. He will be missed.
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