678. Who Gets to Choose a “Good Death”?

Daniel Kahneman was a celebrated and influential scholar, trained in psychology, but with a seemingly limitless way of thinking about the world. In 2002, he won a Nobel Prize in economics. In 2011, he published a popular book called Thinking, Fast and Slow. His primary topic was human decision making, especially how we make decisions under uncertainty. His work has influenced people.

in government and policy making and medicine and finance and the military, the criminal justice system, and more. And why were Kahneman's insights so valuable? Maybe because uncertainty is a feature, not a bug, of human existence. Whatever you do in your professional or personal life, you have to deal with uncertainty. As for certainties, well, there just aren't that many of them.

perhaps the most reliable certainty in life is death. A couple years ago, as Kahneman approached his ninetieth birthday, that certainty must have felt particularly salient. He was still in relatively good health, and his mind was sharp, but he decided that his time had come. He travelled to France, where he'd grown up, barely surviving the Nazis. He gathered with his family in Paris to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, meals, museum visits, nice walks.

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