A Beautiful Mind

"This book is completely different. I picked it because when you think about the field you think also about the people who were involved. Of course the story of Aumann, the story of many other people, is interesting, but Nash’s story also has a message. The message is completely separate from game theory, but nevertheless, it happened around the development of game theory. Sylvia Nasar’s book is a brilliant book because she made a deliberate decision not to explain game theory. What she describes is a human drama. Sylvia Nasar was a reporter for the New York Times when she covered the success of the telecommunications spectrum auctions in 1994. The auction was described – in my opinion wrongly – by the popular press and by some game theoreticians as the glorious success of the field of game theory, in terms of making it applicable. But in any case, the success was in contrast to the misery of one of its important contributors, John Nash. The story of John Nash is really a human story – I don’t think it sheds much light on game theory. In a field like economic theory the personality of the author is not relevant to understanding the subject matter. You might not know that Aumann is a religious Jew, you might think he is a Chinese Buddhist, but nevertheless whatever he wrote will still have the same meaning. That’s probably less true about philosophers or writers. That’s both the power and the weakness of formal models. So this book does not help to understand the field better, but it has a human message. It gives hope to people dealing with this terrible mental disease. Because of my involvement in the story of Nash, I came to talk to many people about it, and I feel that the story of Nash gave them a lot of hope. I was marginally involved in the story of Nash in a couple of ways described in the book. One was making him a fellow in the Econometric Society. This was at the time I was at the London School of Economics, in the mid- to late 1980s. The other nominating committee members were open-minded, famous economists. Nevertheless, I was outvoted four to one against making John Nash a fellow. It’s just an honour. But his mental state influenced even that. A year after it was, of course, corrected. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There’s a big contrast between the attitude to Nash then and now, when Nash is invited to give lectures around the world. His lectures and recovery are important as they give hope to the very large community of people that have family who are sick. He gives an opportunity to people to discuss society’s attitude to mental illness. So I chose A Beautiful Mind as an important human story behind the story of game theory. Yes, but it is not that Nash was the first to use Nash equilibrium. People were using the concept before Nash. But he put it into an elegant framework and showed about it whatever he showed. He did a crucial move but I would be very careful not to say, “Without Nash game theory would not develop.” Without diminishing the importance of it, I don’t think Nash contributed much to the discussion of what Nash equilibrium is."

"This is a very different kind of book: it’s by a journalist, not an economist. It explains the work of John Nash, who was one of the leading lights of game theory. I chose it because game theory is such an important technique in economics and other sciences as well, particularly biology. But books about game theory tend to be pretty heavy going. This is a terrific book for just saying something about what game theory helps to do without plunging you into all the complicated mathematics of how to do it in practice. Game theory is a really powerful technique for understanding the way people respond to each other’s behaviour – for thinking about what incentives they have to do things. What is something likely to make them do? And if they’re going to do that, then what does that imply for what I need to do to get the outcome that I want? It sounds terribly simple, but once you start thinking about it and taking that approach to how people decide anything, then you realise that it’s a tool for thinking about any kind of institution or decision-making context. Game theory was devised and applied originally in the context of making strategic decisions about warfare and the Cold War and nuclear weapons. But you can think about voting behaviour and political choices, you can think about economic decisions, you can think about business strategy. Pretty much any context, you can think about in terms of game theory: If he does this, then what do I do? What’s my strategy? Absolutely. If you’re running a business, or you want to run for office in your local school district, it’s a good way of thinking about how to be successful. And there are, to be fair, some books ­– Barry Nalebuff’s is one that comes to mind – that do try to tell people how to apply it in practice, but A Beautiful Mind is a good read, and a good introduction as to how important it is and why John Nash deserved his Nobel Prize . Also, it’s an absolutely extraordinary human story – as anyone who saw the film will know."