This is an exceptional book - far better than I expected it to be and both well written and insightful.

To start with, Kahneman is a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics who, along with Amos Tversky, is responsible for one of the most vibrant and interesting streams of social science research of the past 40 years. This is a stream of articles on behavioral decision theory - and is now linked with behavioral economics - all of which focus on the ways in which how people actually think, both to understand them on their own terms and to show how their thinking behaviors can differ radically from what is commonly assumed in rational preference models in economics. They are also associated with "prospect theory" in psychology, which is a part of their larger body of work.

This material has come out before in a number of widely cited and very influential scholarly articles. This book provides a translation of these ideas and research results into a language that most people can understand. The author also provides a well done summary and integration of these varied results fit together into an overall picture of the ways in which people actually think, an integration that is missing from the specialized scholarly articles that are directed towards experts already familiar with these studies.

The insights from the book are too numerous to touch upon here. Some readers will no doubt find that they have seen some of this work before. The overall impact of the book is one of a tremendous clarification that shows considerable insight and should prove very useful to even general readers. I thought this would just be a summary, but it is much more. I