Novo Livro de Daniel Kahneman

Resenha de Guy Sorman do novo livro de Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 512 pp., $30): Kahneman does not contradict Smith’s self-love or Keynes’s animal spirits, but he elevates them from intuitions into something like hard scientific evidence. As his important new book Thinking, Fast and Slow demonstrates, economic behavior can be better understood through scientific and psychological experiments. Most of the book describes the psychological experiments that Kahneman and his colleagues conducted to understand how people judge and decide. Kahneman concludes that our minds are divided into two very different operational systems: System One is fast, intuitive, and emotional, while System Two is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The former can result in erratic decision-making and even in compulsive behavior, like buying what we don’t need; the latter leads to slow, deliberate choices. In daily life, we constantly and intuitively shift from one system to the other, depending on circumstances; but external incentives—well understood by marketing experts—can activate one system against the other.