You don't need to go to Harvard to be a smart guy-Try it!

GoodShit

My latest WSJ Head Case column is on Daniel Kahneman’s new book, which is quite wonderful. Even if you think you know prospect theory, it’s insightful to read a review of the work by the master:
Here’s a simple arithmetic question: “A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

What’s most impressive is that education doesn’t really help; more than 50% of students at Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology routinely give the incorrect answer.

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this for more than five decades. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents, Mr. Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

Don't cheat, do your best.

But I am not a Harvard guy and I get it:

Bat+Ball=1.10 

[Bat =1+Ball]

Then 1+2Ball=1.10

Ball=[1.10-1]/2=0.05