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
Nudge (book) placing healthy foods in a school cafeteria at eye level while putting less-healthy junk food in harder-to-reach places. Individuals are not actually prevented from eating whatever they want, but arranging the food choices that way causes people to eat less junk food and more healthy food. Sunstein and Thaler apply the idea of nudges in the context of choice architecture to propose policy recommendations in the spirit of libertarian paternalism. They have recommendations in the areas of finance, health, the environment, schools, and marriage. They believe these problems can at least be partially addressed by improving the choice architecture. Thaler