Richard Thaler is coauthor, with Cass Sunstein, of "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" (Yale University Press, 2008). "Nudge" discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. "People often make poor choices—and look back at them with bafflement!" Thaler and Sunstein write. "We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself." Thaler and his co-author coined
It Was Written not ready for the more prophetic themes of "Nastradamus", as it only sold 232,000 copies by its first week (less than half of "I Am…"s first-week figures). By 2001, "Illmatic" and "It Was Written" were both selling at a rate of over 3,000 copies a week, while "Nastradamus" was earning an average of little more than 2,000 copies a week, despite its relative newness. Both "I Am…" and "Nastradamus" received further criticism for their commercially oriented sound. Reflecting this widespread perception in the hip hop community and adding to his ongoing feud with Jay-Z at the time, Jay-Z mocked him