The Undoing Project

by Michael Lewis

  * * *

  * When B. F. Skinner discovered as a young man that he would never write the great American novel, he felt a despair that he claimed nearly drove him into psychotherapy. The legendary psychologist George Miller claimed that he gave up his literary ambition for psychology because he had nothing to write about. Who knows what mixed feelings William James experienced when he read his brother Henry’s first novel? “It would be interesting to ask how many psychologists come up short next to great writers who happen to be near them,” one prominent American psychologist has said. “It may be the fundamental driver.”

  † A paper by this name did not appear until 1977, but it grew from ideas he’d formed a decade earlier as a graduate student.

  4

  ERRORS

  By the time Amos returned to Israel in the fall of 1966, he’d been gone for five years. His oldest friends naturally compared the returning Amos to the Amos of their memories. They noticed a couple of changes. The Amos who returned from America appeared to them more serious about his work, and to have acquired a whiff of professionalism. He was now an assistant professor, with his own office at Hebrew University. He kept it famously spare. There was never anything on his desk but a mechanical pencil, and, if Amos was seated at it, an eraser and the crisply ordered file of whatever project he happened to be working on. When he’d left for the United States, he hadn’t owned a suit. When he showed up at Hebrew University in a light blue suit, people were genuinely shocked, and not just by the color. “This was inconceivable,” says Avishai Margalit. “This was something you didn’t do. A tie was the symbol of the bourgeoisie. I remember the first time I saw my father in a suit and a tie. It was like finding your father with a whore.” Otherwise Amos was unchanged: the last to go to bed at night, the life of every party, the light to which all butterflies flew, and the freest, happiest, and most interesting person anyone knew. He still did only what he wanted to do. Even his new interest in wearing a suit was more peculiarly Amos than it was bourgeois. Amos chose his suits only by the number and size of the jacket pockets. Along with an interest in pockets, he had what amounted to a fetish for briefcases, and acquired dozens of them. He’d returned from five years in the most materialistic culture on the face of the earth with a desire only for objects that might help him impose order on the world around him.

  Along with a new suit, Amos also had a wife. In Michigan, three years earlier, he had met a fellow psychology student named Barbara Gans. They’d started dating after a year. “He told me he didn’t want to go back to Israel alone,” said Barbara. “And so we got married.” She’d grown up in the Midwest and had never been out of the United States. What Europeans often said about Americans—how wildly informal and improvisational they were—was, to her, even more true of Israelis. “All you had were rubber bands and masking tape, so you fixed things with rubber bands and masking tape,” she said. Though materially poor, Israel felt to her rich in other ways. Israelis—at least the Jewish ones—seemed all to earn roughly the same amount of money, and to have their basic needs met.

  There weren’t many luxuries. She and Amos had no phone and no car, but neither did most of the people they knew. The shops were all small and particular. There was the knife sharpener and the stonecutter and the falafel seller. If you needed a carpenter or a painter you didn’t bother to phone them, even if you owned a phone, because they never answered. You went downtown in the afternoon and hoped to bump into them. “Everything was personal, all transactions. The standard joke was: Someone runs out of their burning house to ask a friend on the street if they know someone in the Fire Department.” There was no television, but there were radios everywhere, and when the BBC came on everyone stopped whatever they were doing to listen. Those words felt consistently urgent. “Everyone was on alert,” said Barbara. The tension in the air wasn’t at all like the strife in the United States over the Vietnam War. In Israel the danger felt present and personal: If the Arabs at every border ever stopped fighting among themselves, there was a sense, Barbara said, that they could overrun the country in a matter of hours and kill you.

  The students at Hebrew University, where Barbara was given a psychology class to teach, seemed to be intent mainly on catching their professors in error. They were shockingly aggressive and lacking in deference. One student had so insulted a visiting American intellectual by interrupting his talk with derisive comments that university officials demanded he seek out the American and apologize. “I’m sorry if I have hurt your feelings,” the student had said to the visiting dignitary, “but, you see, the talk was so bad!” For the final exam in one psychology class, the undergraduates were handed a published piece of research and told to find the flaw in it. On Barbara’s second day, ten minutes into her lecture, a student in the back of the room screamed out, “Not true!” and no one seemed to think anything of it. A distinguished Hebrew University professor delivered a paper titled “What Is Not What in Statistics,” after which a student in the audience announced, loudly enough for many to hear, “This will guarantee him a place in Who Is Not Who in Statistics!”

  And yet at the same time, Israel took its professors more seriously than America did. Israeli intellectuals were presumed to have some possible relevance to the survival of the Jewish state, and the intellectuals responded by at least pretending to be relevant. In Michigan, Barbara and Amos had lived entirely within the university and spent their time with other academic types. Here they mixed with politicians and generals and journalists and others involved directly in running the country. In his first few months back, Amos gave talks about the latest decision-making theories to the generals in the Israeli army and the Israeli Air Force—even though the practical application of the theories was, to put it mildly, unclear. “I’ve never seen a country so concerned with keeping its officials abreast on new developments in academics,” Barbara wrote to her family back home in Michigan.

  And of course everyone was in the army, even the professors, and so it was impossible even for the most rarefied intellectual to insulate himself from the risks facing the entire society. All were exposed equally to the whims of dictators. That truth was hammered home to Barbara six months after she arrived, on May 22, 1967, when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that he was closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. Most Israeli trade passed through the straits, and the announcement was taken as an act of war. “Amos came home one day and said, The army is going to come for me.” He rooted around and found a trunk that held his old paratrooper’s uniform. It still fit him. At ten o’clock that night the army came for him.

  It had been five years since Amos last jumped from an airplane; he was given an infantry unit to command. The entire country prepared for war—and at the same time tried to judge what kind of war it would be. In Jerusalem, those who remembered the war of independence feared another siege and emptied the stores of canned goods. People found it hard to assign probabilities to the potential outcomes: A war with Egypt alone would probably be ugly but survivable; a war with the combined Arab states might mean total annihilation. The Israeli government arranged quietly for the public parks to be consecrated, to allow them to be used as mass graves. The entire country mobilized. Private cars took over the bus routes—as all the buses had been taken by the army. Schoolchildren delivered the milk and the mail. Israeli Arabs, who weren’t allowed to serve in the army, volunteered for the jobs left by Jewish conscripts. All the while an apocalyptic wind blew in from the desert. The sensation was like nothing Barbara had ever experienced. No matter how much you drank you felt thirsty; no matter how wet the laundry, it was dry inside of thirty minutes. It was 95 degrees, but standing in the desert gale you hardly noticed it was hot. She went to a kibbutz on the border just outside Jerusalem to help dig trenches. The man in his forties in charge of the volunteers had lost his leg in the war of independence and wore a prosthetic. He was a poet. He hobbled about, and worked on a poem.

  Before the fighti
ng began, Amos came home twice. Barbara was struck by how casually her new husband tossed his Uzi on the bed before taking a shower. No big deal! The country was in a state of panic, but Amos seemed unconcerned. “He told me, ‘There is no reason to worry. It will depend upon airpower, and we have it. Our Air Force will destroy their planes.’” On the morning of June 5, with Egypt’s army massed along the Israeli border, the Israeli Air Force launched a surprise attack. In a few hours Israeli pilots destroyed four hundred or so planes—virtually the entire Egyptian Air Force. Then the Israeli army rolled into the Sinai. By June 7 Israel was at war on three fronts against the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Barbara went to a bomb shelter in Jerusalem and passed the time sewing sandbags.

  It was later reported that, before the war, President Nasser had spoken with Ahmad Shukairy, the founder of the recently formed Palestine Liberation Organization. Nasser had proposed that Jews who survived the war be returned to their home countries; Shukairy had replied that there was no need to worry about it, as there wouldn’t be any Jewish survivors. The war started on a Monday. The following Saturday the radio announced that it was over. Israel had won such a one-sided victory that it felt to many Jews less like a modern-day war than a miracle from the Bible. The country was suddenly more than twice as big as it had been a few days earlier, and controlled the Old City of Jerusalem, along with all the holy places. Just a week before, it had been the size of New Jersey; now it was bigger than Texas, with far more defensible borders. The radio stopped airing battle reports and played joyous Hebrew songs about Jerusalem. Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.

  On Thursday Barbara got a message from a soldier in Amos’s unit; he let her know that Amos was alive. On Friday Amos drove up to their desert-beige apartment building in an army jeep and told her to hop in. Together they drove around the newly conquered West Bank. Along the way were strange and wonderful sights: warm reunions in the Old City of Jerusalem between Arab and Jewish shopkeepers, separated since 1948. A line of Arab men walking arm in arm up Ruppin Boulevard, in the Jewish Quarter, and pausing at the stoplights to clap . . . for the stoplights. The West Bank they found littered with burned-out Jordanian tanks and jeeps and empty tuna fish cans left by Israelis who had already come to picnic. They ended up in East Jerusalem, at the half-built summer palace of Jordan’s King Hussein, where Amos was now stationed, along with a couple of hundred other Israeli soldiers. “That villa was really a shock,” Barbara wrote to her family in Michigan that night, “combining the worst of Arabic taste with the worst of Miami Beach.”

  Later came the funerals. “This morning the figures were published in the newspaper—679 dead, 2563 wounded,” Barbara wrote in a letter home. “Though the numbers are small, so is the country, so everyone can count the dead among his friends.” Amos had lost one of his men in an attack that he had led on a monastery on top of a hill in Bethlehem. Elsewhere on the battlefield, one of his best friends from childhood had been killed by a sniper, and several Hebrew University professors had been killed or wounded. “I grew up in the Vietnam War and I hadn’t known anyone who had gone to Vietnam, much less died there,” said Barbara. “I knew four people who were killed in the Six-Day War—and I’d only been there six months.”

  For a week or so after the war, Amos camped at King Hussein’s summer palace. He was then installed briefly as military governor of Jericho. Hebrew University was turned into a prisoner-of-war camp. But classes at the university started again on June 26, and the professors who had fought in the war were expected to resume their former posts without a lot of fuss. Among them was Amnon Rapoport, who had returned with Amos to Israel, joined him in Hebrew University’s Department of Psychology, and taken his natural place as Amos’s closest friend. When Amos set off with his infantry unit, Amnon had climbed into another tank and rolled back into Jordan. His tanks had taken the lead in breaking through the Jordanian army’s front lines. This time Amnon had to admit to himself that this business of leaping into and out of wars had left him in a less than tranquil state of mind. “I mean, how is it possible? I am a young assistant professor. And they take me and within twenty-four hours I start killing people and become a killing machine. I didn’t know how to put it together. The dreams troubled me for several months. Amos and I talked about it: how to reconcile these two sides of life. Professor and killer.”

  He and Amos had always assumed that they would work jointly to explore how people made decisions, but Amos was attached at the hip to Israel, and Amnon, once again, just wanted to get away. The problem, to Amnon, wasn’t just the constant warfare. The idea of working with Amos had lost its allure. “He was so dominating, intellectually,” said Amnon. “I realized that I didn’t want to stay in the shadow of Amos all my life.” In 1968 Amnon took off for the United States, became a professor at the University of North Carolina, and left Amos without anyone to talk to.

  * * *

  In early 1967 Avishai Henik was twenty-one years old and working on a kibbutz in range of the Golan Heights. Every now and then the Syrians above him fired shells down on the kibbutz, but Avi didn’t give it much thought. He’d just finished his army service and, even though he had been a poor student in high school, was thinking of going to university. In May 1967 he was trying, without a great deal of success, to decide what he would study, and the Israeli army called him back into service. If they were calling him, Avi assumed, there was going to be a war. He joined a unit of maybe one hundred and fifty paratroopers, most of whom he’d never laid eyes on.

  Ten days later the war broke out. Avi had never seen combat. At first his commanding officers said that he was going to parachute into the Sinai and fight Egyptians. Then they changed their minds and ordered Avi’s unit to board buses for Jerusalem, where a second front, with Jordan, had opened. In Jerusalem, there were two points of attack on the Jordanian troops entrenched just outside the Old City. Avi’s unit slipped through the Jordanian front lines without firing a shot. “The Jordanians didn’t even notice,” he said. Hours later, a second Israeli paratrooper unit followed and was cut to bits: Avi’s unit had gotten lucky. Once past the front lines, his unit approached the old walls. “That’s when the shooting started,” he said. Avi found himself trotting right beside a young man he liked named Moishe—Avi had only just met him a few days earlier, but he’d remember his face forever. A bullet struck Moishe and he fell. “He was dead in a minute.” Avi moved on with the sense that at any moment he might die, too. “I was terrified,” he said. “Really afraid.” His unit fought their way through the Old City, and along the way ten more men were killed. “It was one here, one there.” Avi recalled images and dramatic moments: Moishe’s face; the Jordanian mayor of Jerusalem approaching his unit waving a white flag, standing beside the Wailing Wall. The last was incredible. “I was shocked. I’d seen it in pictures. And now I am standing right beside it.” He turned to his commander and said how happy he was, and his commander replied, “Well, Avishai, you will not be happy tomorrow when you hear how many have been killed.” Avi found a phone and called his mother and said simply, “I’m alive.”

  Avi’s Six-Day War wasn’t over. Having taken the Old City of Jerusalem, the surviving paratroopers in his unit were dispatched to the Golan Heights: Now they would fight Syrians. Along the way they met a middle-aged woman who came up to them and said, “You are paratroopers—has anyone seen my Moishe?” None of them had the courage to tell her what had happened to her son. Once they walked into the shadow of the Golan Heights, they were told their assignment: They would ascend in helicopters, jump out, and attack the Syrian troops in their trenches. Hearing this, Avi became oddly but completely certain that he was about to die. “I had the feeling that if I didn’t die in Jerusalem, I would die in the Golan Heights,” he said. “You don’t get two chances.” His commanding officer assigned him to walk point in the Syrian trenches—he would run in the front of a line of Israeli pa
ratroopers until he was either killed or out of bullets.

  Then—the very morning they were to go—the Israeli government announced that there would be a cease-fire at 6:30 p.m. For a brief moment Avi felt as if his life had been handed back to him. And yet his commanding officer insisted on proceeding with the attack. Avi couldn’t understand it and summoned the nerve to ask his commanding officer why. Why go when the war will be over in a few hours? “He said, ‘Avi, you are so naive. Do you think we will not take the Golan Heights even though there will be a cease-fire?’ I said, ‘Okay, prepare to die.’” With Avi in the lead, the paratrooper battalion stormed the Golan Heights in helicopters and leapt into the Syrian trenches. And the Syrians were gone. The trenches were empty.

  After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, “I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul.” Hebrew University had no room for him, so he went to a new university south of Tel Aviv called the University of the Negev. The campus was in Beersheba. He took two classes from a professor named Danny Kahneman, who was moonlighting because his job at Hebrew University didn’t pay enough. The first was an introduction to statistics, which sounded deadly, only it wasn’t. “He made it real by taking all these examples from life,” recalled Avi. “He wasn’t just teaching statistics. He was teaching: what is the meaning of all this?”