Original source (on modern site)
New Delhi: Nobel laureate (2002 prize) psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman died late on March 27. He was 90. Advertisement >
BBC has opened its obituary of him by pointing out that "he became synonymous with behavioural economics, even though he never took a course of economics.">
It was Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that propelled him to the best-seller list and he lived on beyond his Nobel prize status as a popular writer. His book argued that people are more likely to act on instinct than as cold rational beings who operate and make decisions solely on self-interest. Advertisement >
He was also and co-author of Noise: A Flaw in Judgment. In 2013, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.>
He had been at Princeton University since 1993. Daniel Kahneman is described on the university's website as Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Advertisement >
Professor Eldar Shafir is quoted as saying, "Danny was a giant in the field, a Princeton star, a brilliant man, and a great colleague and friend.">
He added that "many areas in the social sciences simply have not been the same since he arrived on the scene. He will be greatly missed.">
Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv, in what is now Israel, in 1934, while his mother was visiting her extended family there. His family was otherwise based in Paris. His parents were Lithuanian Jews, who had immigrated to France in the early 1920s and had done quite well. His father was the chief of research in a large chemical factory. >
He had poignantly spoken of how "although my parents loved most things French and had some French friends, their roots in France were shallow, and they never felt completely secure. Of course, whatever vestiges of security they'd had were lost when the Germans swept into France in 1940. What was probably the first graph I ever drew, in 1941, showed my family's fortunes as a function of time - and around 1940 the curve crossed into the negative domain." Advertisement >
Tim Hartford, an author and popular columnist at The Financial Times described him as "a giant of social science" and said, "So sad to hear of the death of the great Danny Kahneman. I've had the privilege of interviewing many of the greats in social science (Becker, Schelling, Thaler, Levitt, Duflo and others) but Kahneman is the one who took up residence in my subconscious I would ask myself, "what would Danny Kahneman think about this"? I had the chance to tell him that and he found it most amusing - he did not at all regard himself as a guru or a dispenser of useful advice.">
His experience of Nazi concentration camps shaped his life, "my father was picked up in the first large-scale sweep for Jews, and was interned for six weeks in Drancy, which had been set up as a way station to the extermination camps. He was released through the intervention of his firm, which was directed (a fact I learned only from an article I read a few years ago) by the financial mainstay of the Fascist anti-Semitic movement in France in the 1930s. The story of my father's release, which I never fully understood, also involved a beautiful woman and a German general who loved her. Soon afterward, we escaped to Vichy France, and stayed on the Riviera in relative safety, until the Germans arrived and we escaped again, to the center of France.">
Daniel Kahneman held his Nobel Prize Lecture, Maps of Bounded Rationality on December 8, 2002, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University. You can read that here.>
When asked in a recent podcast by Dr Scott Barry Kaufmann, he was very hesitant when asked to give advice. He eventually said his only 'advice' to young psychologists would be to not get stuck and attached to one's own ideas. You can hear him on his life and work here. Advertisement >