The Undoing Project

by Michael Lewis

  His father worked on a farm. His mother was a cook. “I came here, I can’t speak English,” he said. “I could not speak to anyone. It was very hard for me. Nothing. Zero.” As he struggled to relate the incredible story of his journey from his eight-hundred-person Indian village to the front office of the Houston Rockets, his eyes searched the room for approval. The executives of the Houston Rockets were ciphers. Not unfriendly, but not giving up anything, either.

  “What would you say your basketball strengths are?” asked the interviewer. “What are you best at?”

  The Rockets interviewer read from a script. Singh’s answers would be entered into the Rockets database, compared to the answers given by a thousand other players, and studied for patterns. They still clung to the hope that they might one day measure character, or at least get a sense how a poor kid would behave after he’d been handed millions of dollars and, usually, a seat on the bench. Would he keep working hard? Would he listen to coaches?

  Morey hadn’t found anyone—inside or outside basketball—who could answer those questions, though there was no end to psychologists who pretended to be able to. The Rockets had hired a bunch of them. “It’s been horrible,” says Morey. “A horrible experience. Every year I think there’s got to be something there. Every year we find someone with a different approach. Every year it is totally pointless. And every year we try again. I’m starting to think psychologists are complete charlatans.” The last psychologist who showed up claiming to be able to predict behavior had essentially used the Myers-Briggs personality test—and then tried to persuade Morey, after the fact, that he had warded off all manner of unseen problems. The way he’d gone on reminded Daryl Morey of a joke. “The guy walks around with a banana in his ear. And people are like, ‘Why do you have a banana in your ear?’ He says, ‘To keep the alligators away! There are no alligators! See?’”

  The Indian giant said his strengths were his post-up game and his midrange shooting.

  “Have you broken any team rules while at IMG?” asked the interviewer.

  Singh was confused. He didn’t understand the question.

  “No problems with the police?” Morey said helpfully.

  “No fighting?” asked the interviewer.

  Singh’s face cleared. “Never!” he exclaimed. “Never in my life. I’ve never tried. If I tried, somebody would die.”

  The Rockets executives had been studying Singh’s body. One of them finally couldn’t contain himself. “Have you always been so tall?” he asked, going off script. “Or was there an age when you started to grow up faster?”

  Singh explained that he was five foot nine at the age of eight and seven foot one at the age of fifteen. It ran in the family. His grandmother was six foot nine . . .

  Morey stirred in his seat. He wanted to get back to questions that might lead to predictions. He asked, “What have you improved the most at—what can you do well now that maybe you didn’t do as well two years ago?”

  “I feel most badly on my mind. My mind.”

  “Sorry, I mean basketball skills. Like on the floor.”

  “Post game,” he said. He said other things but they were unintelligible.

  “Who do you think you are most like in the NBA—similar in terms of game?” asked Morey.

  “Jowman and Shkinoonee,” said Singh, without missing a beat.

  A silence followed. Then Morey realized. “Oh, Yao Ming.” Another pause. “Who was the second one?”

  “Shkinoonee.”

  Someone made a guess: “Shaq?”

  “Shaq, yes,” said Singh, relieved.

  “Oh, Shaquille O’Neal,” said Morey, finally getting it.

  “Yes, same body type and same post-up,” said Singh. Most players compared themselves to someone they actually looked like. Then again, there was no NBA player who looked like Satnam Singh. If he made it, he’d be the league’s first Indian.

  “What do you got around your neck there?” Morey asked.

  Singh grabbed his dog tags and stared down at his chest. “This is my family names,” he said, fingering one. Then he took the second dog tag and simply read what it said: “I miss my coaches. I love ball. Ball is my life.”

  That he needed a dog tag to remind him wasn’t the best sign. A lot of big guys played just because they were big. Long ago some coach or parent had yanked them onto a basketball court, and social pressure kept them there. They were less likely than small players to work hard to improve, and more likely to take your money and fade away. It wasn’t that they were consciously deceitful; it was that the sort of big kid who had played basketball his entire life mainly to please others had become so practiced at telling people what they wanted to hear that he didn’t know his own heart.

  At length, Singh left the interview room. “Have we found evidence he has played organized basketball anywhere?” Morey asked, once he was gone. You couldn’t control how you felt about the player after the interview, but you could use data to control the influence of those feelings. (Or could you?)

  “They say he played at the IMG Academy in Florida.”

  “I hate these kinds of bets,” said Morey. He’d watch Singh work out for thirty minutes, but his decision was already made. They had no data on him. Without data, there’s nothing to analyze. The Indian was DeAndre Jordan all over again; he was, like most of the problems you faced in life, a puzzle, with pieces missing. The Houston Rockets would pass on him—and be shocked when the Dallas Mavericks took him in the second round of the NBA draft. Then again, you never knew.††

  And that was the problem: You never knew. In Morey’s ten years of using his statistical model with the Houston Rockets, the players he’d drafted, after accounting for the draft slot in which they’d been taken, had performed better than the players drafted by three-quarters of the other NBA teams. His approach had been sufficiently effective that other NBA teams were adopting it. He could even pinpoint the moment when he felt, for the first time, imitated. It was during the 2012 draft, when the players were picked in almost the exact same order the Rockets ranked them. “It’s going straight down our list,” said Morey. “The league was seeing things the same way.”

  And yet even Leslie Alexander, the only owner with both the inclination and the nerve to hire someone like him back in 2006, could grow frustrated with Daryl Morey’s probabilistic view of the world. “He will want certainty from me, and I have to tell him it ain’t coming,” said Morey. He’d set out to be a card counter at a casino blackjack table, but he could live the analogy only up to a point. Like a card counter, he was playing a game of chance. Like a card counter, he’d tilted the odds of that game slightly in his favor. Unlike a card counter—but a lot like someone making a life decision—he was allowed to play only a few hands. He drafted a few players a year. In a few hands, anything could happen, even with the odds in his favor.

  At times Morey stopped to consider the forces that had made it possible for him—a total outsider who could offer his employer only slightly better odds of success—to run a professional basketball team. He hadn’t needed to get rich enough to buy one. Oddly enough, he hadn’t needed to change anything about himself. The world had changed to accommodate him. Attitudes toward decision making had shifted so dramatically since he was a kid that he’d been invited into professional basketball to speed the change. The availability of ever-cheaper computing power and the rise of data analysis obviously had a lot to do with making the world more hospitable to the approach Daryl Morey took to it. The change in the kind of person who got rich enough to buy a professional sports franchise also had helped. “The owners often made their money from disrupting fields where most of the conventional wisdom is bullshit,” said Morey. These people tended to be keenly aware of the value of even slight informational advantages, and open to the idea of using data to gain those advantages. But this raised a bigger question: Why had so much conventional wisdom
been bullshit? And not just in sports but across the whole society. Why had so many industries been ripe for disruption? Why was there so much to be undone?

  It was curious, when you thought about it, that such a putatively competitive market as a market for highly paid athletes could be so inefficient in the first place. It was strange that when people bothered to measure what happened on the court, they had measured the wrong things so happily for so long. It was bizarre that it was even possible for a total outsider to walk into the game with an entirely new approach to valuing basketball players and see his approach adopted by much of the industry.

  At the bottom of the transformation in decision making in professional sports—but not only in professional sports—were ideas about the human mind, and how it functioned when it faced uncertain situations. These ideas had taken some time to seep into the culture, but now they were in the air we breathed. There was a new awareness of the sorts of systematic errors people might make—and so entire markets might make—if their judgments were left unchecked. There were reasons basketball experts could not see that Jeremy Lin was an NBA player, or could be blinded to the value of Marc Gasol by a single photograph of him, or would never see the next Shaquille O’Neal if he happened to be an Indian. “It was like a fish not knowing he is breathing water unless someone points it out,” Morey said of people’s awareness of their own mental processes. As it happens, someone had pointed it out.

  * * *

  * Hunter actually started for the Celtics for a season and went on to a successful career in Europe.

  † There’s no perfect way to measure the quality of a draft choice, but there’s a sensible one: comparing the player’s output in his first four years, the years the NBA team that drafts him also controls him, to the average output of players drafted in that slot. By that measure, Carl Landry and Aaron Brooks were the 35th and 55th best picks of the six hundred or so picks made by NBA teams in the last decade.

  ‡ Before the 2015 season, DeAndre Jordan signed a four-year contract with the Clippers that guaranteed him $87,616,050, then the NBA’s maximum salary. Joey Dorsey signed a one-year deal for $650,000 with Galatasaray Liv Hospital of the Turkish Basketball League.

  § Gasol became a two-time All-Star (2012, 2015) and, by Houston’s reckoning, the third-best pick made by the entire NBA over the past decade, after Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin.

  ¶ In 2015 Tyler Harvey, a shooting guard out of Eastern Washington, made the rounds. When asked whose game his most resembled, he said, “To be honest with you, I’m most like Steph Curry,” and he would go on to say that, as had been the case with Steph Curry, big colleges had taken no interest in him. A total lack of appeal to college basketball coaches was now a good thing! Harvey was taken late in the second round of the draft with the 51st overall pick. “If Curry doesn’t exist, no way he [Harvey] is drafted,” said Morey.

  ** They made the trade, and then used the draft pick as the biggest chit in a deal to land a superstar, James Harden.

  †† As of this writing, it is still too early to tell.

  2

  THE OUTSIDER

  Of Danny Kahneman’s many doubts the most curious were the ones he had about his own memory. He’d delivered entire semesters of lectures straight from his head without a note. To his students he’d seemed to have memorized entire textbooks, and he wasn’t shy about asking them to do it, too. And yet when he was asked about some event in his past, he’d say that he didn’t trust his memory and so you shouldn’t, either. Possibly this was a simple extension of what amounted to Danny’s life strategy of not trusting himself. “His defining emotion is doubt,” said one of his former students. “And it’s very useful. Because it makes him go deeper and deeper and deeper.” Or maybe he just wanted another line of defense against anyone hoping to figure him out. In any case, he kept at a great distance the forces and events that had shaped him.

  He might not trust his memories, but he still had a few. For instance, he remembered the time in late 1941 or early 1942—at any rate, a year or more after the start of the German occupation of Paris—when he was caught on the streets after curfew. The new laws required him to wear the yellow Star of David on the front of his sweater. His new badge caused him such deep shame that he took to going to school half an hour early so that the other children wouldn’t see him walking into the building wearing it. After school, on the streets, he’d turn his sweater inside out.

  Heading home too late one evening, he saw a German soldier approaching. “He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others—the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers,” he recalled, in the autobiographical statement required of him by the Nobel Committee. “As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”

  He also remembered the sight of his father after he’d been taken away in a big sweep in November 1941. Thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to camps. Danny had complicated feelings about his mother. His father he’d simply loved. “My father was radiant; he had enormous charm.” He was jailed in the makeshift prison in Drancy, outside of Paris. In Drancy, public housing designed for seven hundred people was used to imprison as many as seven thousand Jews at a time. “I have this memory of going with my mother to see this prison,” Danny recalled. “And I remember it was sort of pink-orange. There were people, but you couldn’t see the faces. You could hear women and children. And I remember the prison guard. He said, ‘It’s hard in there. They are eating peels.’” For most Jews, Drancy was just a stop on the way to a concentration camp: Upon arrival, many of the children were separated from their mothers and put on trains to be gassed at Auschwitz.

  Danny’s father was released after six weeks, thanks to his association with Eugène Schueller. Schueller was the founder and head of the giant French cosmetics company L’Oréal, where Danny’s father worked as a chemist. Long after the war Schueller would be exposed as one of the architects of an organization to help the Nazis find and kill French Jews. Somehow he carved out in his mind a special exemption for his star chemist; he persuaded the Germans that Danny’s father was “central to the war effort,” and he was sent back to Paris. Danny recalled that day vividly. “We knew he was coming back so we went shopping. When we came back we rang the bell and he opened the door. And he was wearing his best suit. He weighed forty-five kilos [ninety-nine pounds]. He was skin and bones. And he hadn’t eaten. That is the thing that impressed me. He waited for us to eat.”

  Seeing that even Schueller couldn’t keep them safe in Paris, Danny’s father took his family and fled. By 1942 the borders were closed, and there was no clear path to safety. Danny, his older sister, Ruth, and his parents, Ephraim and Rachel, made a run for the south, which the Vichy regime still nominally governed. Along the way there were close calls and complications. They hid in barns: Danny remembered those, along with the phony identity cards his father had somehow secured in Paris that contained a misspelling. Danny and his sister and mother were called “Cadet” while his father had been given the name “Godet.” To avoid detection Danny had been required to call his father “Uncle.” He also needed to do the speaking for his mother, as her first language was Yiddish, and she still spoke French with an accent. His mother on mute was a rare sight. She always had a great deal to say. She blamed her husband for their circumstances. They’d stayed in Paris only because he had allowed himself to be misguided by his memory of the Great War. The Germans hadn’t gotten to Paris then, he’d said, so they surely wouldn’t get to Paris now. She hadn’t agreed. “I do remember that my mother saw the horrors coming long before he did—s
he was the pessimist and the worrier, he was sunny and optimistic.” Danny sensed already that he was very like his mother and not at all like his father. His feelings about himself were complicated.

  The approaching winter of 1942 found them in a coastal town called Juan-les-Pins, in a state of dread. They now had their own house, courtesy of the Nazi collaborator, with a chemistry lab in it, so that Danny’s father could continue to work. To blend into their new society, his parents sent Danny to school, with a warning to be careful not to say too much or seem too clever. “They were afraid I would be identified as Jewish.” For as long as he could remember he had thought of himself as precocious and bookish. His body he felt little connection to. He was so bad at sports he’d one day be referred to by classmates as The Living Corpse. A gym teacher would prevent him from being given academic honors on the grounds that “there are limits to everything.” His mind, however, was limber and muscular. From the moment he thought of what he might be when he grew up, he simply assumed he would be an intellectual. That was his image of himself: a brain without a body. He now had a new one: a rabbit in a rabbit hunt. The goal simply was to survive.

  On November 10, 1942, the Germans moved into the south of France. German soldiers in black uniforms now pulled men off buses and stripped them to see if they were circumcised. “Anyone who was caught was dead,” recalled Danny. His father firmly did not believe in God: His loss of faith had led him, as a young man, to leave Lithuania, and the illustrious line of rabbis from which he descended, for Paris. Danny wasn’t ready to abandon the idea that the universe had some unseen caring force in it. “I was sleeping under the same mosquito net as my parents,” he said. “They were in a big bed. I was in a small bed. I was nine. And I would pray to God. And the prayer was: I know you are very busy and that this is a tough time and all that. I don’t want to ask for much but I want to ask for one more day.”