I know that you messed up on some decisions. I sure have.

This book is about decisions and elections. It is about decisions in the family, in economics, in engineering, in politics, and in every day life. Decisions are necessary, but even with the best of intentions the outcomes can go astray; they can be dreadfully wrong. Even worse, surprisingly often these “bad outcomes” occur for reasons so subtle that most of us may never realize that a mistake has been made. This can hurt. Realistically, if we fail to recognize that unanticipated, undesired outcomes can occur, we run the risk of inadvertently choosing badly.

In this book, by explaining what can go wrong and why, I describe central difficulties which can infect our decision processes. Examples and new explanations are used to introduce basic results and recent conclusions. The topics are purposely chosen to encourage the reader to further explore why it is so easy for “bad” outcomes to occur in politics, economics, law, engineering, and just about anywhere decisions are made.

This issue of trying to understand what can go right or wrong with decisions is not new; it has been a central concern for centuries if not millennia. Yet, this important topic was not embraced by academics until 1770 when the French mathematician Jean Charles de Borda introduced the issue to the French Academy of Science. Borda did so in a particularly pragmatic and personal manner.