Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow: From Bestseller to Textbook

Abstract

Thinking, fast and slow is an international bestseller and already a classic. It can be a behavioral economics textbook, too. I have tried and it worked. I have broken the book into five parts, each of which I will address in turn. I will not provide exhaustive details of the chapters; these can be found elsewhere in the notes compiled by Jane Sigford (available on http://www.academia.edu/5787896/Book-notesthinking-fast-andslow). Part I covers the two systems that are supposedly in charge of our mind and drive the way we think. System 1 is fast and intuitive; System 2 is slower and more deliberative. In the first nine chapters, Kahneman offers a world class survey of the recent developments in cognitive psychology, which can be useful for economics, finance, and marketing. Here, Kahneman successfully accommodates the work of his entire career within the two-system framework. His work with Amos Tversky garnered Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics (Tversky died in 1996 of skin cancer).