Daniel Kahneman

Origins and early life

Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv on 5 March 1934, while his mother was visiting her family there, and grew up in Paris, where his father was head of research at a large chemical factory. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had moved to France in the early 1920s; in occupied Paris he wore the Star of David, his father was held for six weeks at Drancy, and the family fled to the south and the centre of France, where his father lost his life to poorly treated diabetes in 1944.

After the war he went with his mother and sister to Palestine, graduated in psychology and mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954, and as a young army officer designed an interview for combat recruits that stayed in use for decades.

Work and career

He earned his doctorate at Berkeley in 1961 and taught at the Hebrew University until 1978. In 1969 he began working with Amos Tversky, and their 1974 article in Science documented the systematic biases of intuitive judgment under uncertainty. Their prospect theory, published in Econometrica in 1979, described how people really choose between risks, work the Nobel Foundation says gave rise to a new branch of economics.

He moved to the University of British Columbia in 1978, the year he wed the psychologist Anne Treisman, then to Berkeley in 1986 and to Princeton in 1993.

Recognition

The 2002 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was shared equally with Vernon Smith, Kahneman's half “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty”; he wrote that Tversky would have shared it had he lived past 1996. His 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow brought that work to a wide readership, and in 2013 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in Switzerland on 27 March 2024, three weeks after his ninetieth birthday.