Their final conversations had been mostly about their work. But not all of them. There were things Amos wanted to say to Danny. He wanted to tell him that no one had caused him more pain in his life. To stop himself from echoing the sentiment, Danny had to bite his tongue. He also said that Danny was, even now, the person he most wanted to talk to. “He said I’m the one he’s most comfortable talking to, because I’m not afraid of death,” recalled Danny. “He knew I’m ready to die anytime.”
As Amos approached his death, Danny spoke to him nearly every day. He wondered aloud at Amos’s desire to keep on living exactly as he had, and his disinterest in fresh, new experiences. “What am I going to do, go to Bora-Bora?” Amos had replied. From that moment Danny lost any interest he might have had in ever visiting Bora-Bora. The mention of the name would forever trigger an uneasy ripple in his mind. After Amos had told him that he was dying, Danny had suggested that they write something together—an introduction to a collection of their old papers. Amos had died before they could finish. In their final conversation, Danny told Amos that he dreaded the thought of writing something under Amos’s name of which Amos might disapprove. “I said, ‘I don’t trust what I’m going to do,’” Danny said. “And he said, ‘You will just have to trust in the model of me that is in your mind.’”
Danny remained at Princeton, where he had gone to escape Amos. After Amos’s death, Danny’s phone rang more often than ever. Amos might be gone, but their work lived on, and it was getting more and more attention. And when people spoke of it they no longer said “Tversky and Kahneman.” People began to refer to “Kahneman and Tversky.” Then, in the fall of 2001, Danny received an invitation to visit Stockholm and speak at a conference. Members of the Nobel Committee would attend, along with leading economists. All the speakers but Danny were economists. Like Danny, they were all pretty obviously under consideration for the prize. “It was an audition,” said Danny. He worked hard to prepare his talk, which he knew had to be about something other than the work he had done with Amos. Some of his friends found that odd, as it was the joint work with Amos that had caught the interest of the Nobel Committee. “I was invited for the joint work,” said Danny, “but I needed to show that I on my own am good enough. The question wasn’t, was the work worthy? The question was, am I worthy?”
Danny didn’t usually prepare his talks. He’d once given a college commencement speech entirely off-the-cuff, and no one seemed to realize that he hadn’t thought about what he was going to say until he sat on the dais waiting to be announced. That talk in Stockholm he’d really worked on. “I sweated it out to such an extent that I spent a lot of time choosing the exact color of the background for the slides,” he said. His subject was happiness. He spoke of the ideas that he most regretted not exploring together with Amos. How people’s anticipation of happiness differed from the happiness they experienced, and how both differed from the happiness they remembered. How you could measure these things—by, say, questioning people before, during, and after painful colonoscopies. If happiness was so malleable, it made a mockery of economic models that were premised on the idea that people maximized their “utility.” What, exactly, was to be maximized?
After his talk, Danny returned to Princeton. He had the idea that, if he was ever to be given a Nobel Prize, it would be the following year. They’d seen and heard him in the flesh. They’d judge him worthy or not.
All potential winners were aware of the day the call from Stockholm would come, in the early morning, were it to come at all. On October 9, 2002, Danny and Anne sat in their home in Princeton, both waiting and not waiting. Danny was actually writing a reference for one of his star graduate students, Terry Odean. He honestly hadn’t thought much about what he would do if he won a Nobel Prize. Or, rather, he had specifically not allowed himself to think much about what he would do if he won a Nobel Prize. As a child during the war, he’d cultivated an active fantasy life. He would play out elaborate scenes with himself at the center of them. He imagined himself single-handedly winning the war and ending it, for example. But because he was Danny, he made a rule about his fantasy life: He never fantasized about something that might happen. He established this private rule for his imagination once he realized that, after he had fantasized about something that might actually happen, he lost his drive to make it happen. His fantasies were so vivid that “it was as if you actually had it,” and if you actually had it, why would you bother to work hard to get it? He’d never end the war that killed his father, so what did it matter if he created an elaborate scenario in which he won it single-handedly?
Danny had not allowed himself to imagine what he would do if he were ever given a Nobel Prize. Which was just as well, as the phone didn’t ring. At some point Anne got up and said, a bit sadly, “Oh well.” Every year there were disappointed people. Every year there were old people waiting by phones. Anne went off to exercise and left Danny alone. He’d always been good at preparing himself for not getting what he wanted, and in the grand scheme of things this was not a hard blow. He was fine with who he was and what he had done. He could now safely imagine what he would have done had he won the Nobel Prize. He would have brought Amos’s wife and children with him. He would have appended to his Nobel lecture his eulogy of Amos. He would have carried Amos to Stockholm with him. He would have done for Amos what Amos could never do for him. There were many things Danny would have done, but now he had things to do. He went back to writing his enthusiastic reference for Terry Odean.
Then the phone rang.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Papers written for social science journals are not intended for public consumption. For a start, they’re instinctively defensive. The readers of academic papers, in the mind’s eye of their authors, are at best skeptical, and more commonly hostile. The writers of these papers aren’t trying to engage their readers, much less give them pleasure. They’re trying to survive them. As a result, I found that I was able to get a clearer, more direct, and more enjoyable understanding of the ideas in academic papers by speaking with their authors than by reading the papers themselves—though of course I read the papers, too.