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
Mike Thaler country as one of the authors for the Jello Reading Rocket program for one year. In 1989, a picture book called "The Teacher From the Black Lagoon™", written by Thaler and illustrated by Jared Lee, was published by Dodd, Mead & Company, Little Brown & Company, and Scholastic. From 1989–2007, The Black Lagoon™ picture book series adds 20 more titles, with 3 of the titles receiving International Reading Children's Choice Awards: "The Cafeteria Lady (1992), The Music Teacher"(2001) & "The Custodian"(2002). In 2002, Scholastic released the first Black Lagoon™ Chapter book, "The Class Trip from the Black Lagoon". Between 2002