Daniel Kahneman Audiobooks

Thinking, Fast and Slow: the Nobel psychologist who mapped how the mind fools itself

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

47 listener ratings

Who is Daniel Kahneman?

The psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics never took a single course in economics. Daniel Kahneman, born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and raised partly in occupied France, taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, British Columbia and Berkeley before settling at Princeton, and did his defining work in partnership with Amos Tversky between 1969 and Tversky’s death in 1996.

Together they demonstrated, experiment by experiment, that human judgement under uncertainty runs on predictable shortcuts rather than the tidy rationality economic models assumed. Prospect theory, published in 1979, reframed how losses and gains are weighed and eventually earned Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize, an award Tversky did not live to share.

He wrote for the general reader late and only twice, with Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011 and Noise in 2021, the latter with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. Kahneman died in March 2024, at ninety, having spent six decades arguing that the most interesting thing about the mind is where it reliably goes wrong.

Daniel Kahneman in audiobooks

Twenty hours is exactly the right length for Thinking, Fast and Slow, because this is not a book to skim. It builds its case slowly, from anchoring and availability through loss aversion to the difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self, and the audio format suits that patience better than you might expect.

Patrick Egan narrates, unhurried and clear, letting the experiments land without dramatising them. The famous set pieces work particularly well aloud, because you get caught out by them in real time, a beat or two before the explanation arrives.

Listener ratings are strong. If you have only ever met System 1 and System 2 as business jargon, the original will surprise you with how careful and how modest it actually is. Give it the long walks it deserves, and start below.