Daniel Kahneman, author of ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow,’ to speak at Yale

Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, widely credited as the father of behavioral economics and author of the 2011 best-seller “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” will deliver the 2013 Arthur M. Okun Public Policy Lecture at Yale on Wednesday, Feb. 20.

Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, widely credited as the father of behavioral economics and author of the 2011 best-seller “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” will deliver the 2013 Arthur M. Okun Public Policy Lecture on Wednesday, Feb. 20.

Daniel Kahneman

Free and open to the public, the lecture, titled “A Psychological Perspective on Rationality,” will take place in Rm. 114 of Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, 1 Prospect St., 4–5:30 p.m.

A pioneering expert on the psychology of economic decision-making, Kahneman currently is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for understanding common human errors and developed the “prospect theory,” which describes how people make economic decisions that are not in their own interest when weighing risk against gain. He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for that theory, which is considered the foundation of behavioral economics.

An authority also on hedonic psychology — the science of happiness — Kahneman is a founding partner of The Greatest Good, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He has held academic positions at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1970–1978), the University of British Columbia (1978–1986), and the University of California-Berkeley (1986–1994). In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received such honors as the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky; the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), and the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007). He holds honorary degrees from numerous universities, and in 2011 Foreign Policy magazine named him to its list of top global thinkers.

The lecture series honors the memory of Arthur M. Okun (1928-1980), a longtime professor of economics at Yale who is best known for the widely accepted economic principle Okun’s Law. The lecture series was established in the early 1980s to recognize and perpetuate economic policies, exemplified in Okun’s work, that contribute to the betterment of life and living. Among notable recent speakers in the series are Raghuram G. Rajan, Lawrence H. Summers, Kenneth S. Rogoff, and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

For more information, please contact Carol Copeland at 203-432-3726 or carol.copeland@yale.edu.

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Media Contact

Dorie Baker: dorie.baker@yale.edu, 203-432-1345