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
Thaler Thaler The thaler was a silver coin used throughout Europe for almost four hundred years. Its name lives on in the many currencies called "dollar" and the Samoan tālā, and, until recently, also in the Slovenian tolar. The name "thaler" was used as an abbreviation of "Joachimsthaler", a coin type from the town of Joachimsthal in the Kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), where there were silver mines and the first such coins were minted in 1518. This original Bohemian thaler carried a lion, from the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Bohemia, on its reverse side. Etymologically,