It's Wednesday, March 19, 2025. I'm Albert Mowler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

To be human is to think. We define ourselves, we name ourselves holosapians, the being who thinks, the conscious thinking being.

But as you know, even as that is a reflection of the fact that we are made in God's image, to be human is to think and eventually to think about thinking.

Now, that's something we acquire over time. A three-year-old thinks, but a three-year-old does not think about thinking.

On the other hand, a 13-year-old, well, he or she thinks about thinking.

That's a part of what makes 13 such an interesting age.

There have to be developments in the brain that allow for complex analytical cognition.

That is the ability to abstract yourself, to watch your own thinking,

to anticipate other minds at work. But this is not only a matter of practicality, it is also a

matter of economics, and no one made that point more famously than Daniel Kahneman,

one of the most influential economists in the world. His 2011 book entitled Thinking Fast and Slow

was the culmination of a work trying to think about thinking. It all began when he was a very

young boy and a teenager growing up in what would eventually become Israel was Palestine under the

mandate, and then eventually the nation of

Israel. He grew up as a Jewish boy with some of his family having fled Hitler, and he grew up

and went to high school there in Israel and then came to the United States. He eventually earned a PhD

in psychology there at the University of California at Berkeley. He was very interested

in how human beings think. That became an obsession, indeed. That was the main professional

interest of his life. He worked with others, including his very close associate, Amos Tversky,

and he worked on watching human beings think. Eventually, that led to the Nobel Prize in

Economics in 2002. So you have a person trained in psychology who wins the Nobel Prize in

economics and was considered one of the world's most influential economic thinkers, ranked

...