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 (modern: ) is German for "valley", and a "thaler" is a person or a thing "from the valley". The Czech spelling was ; many varieties of the term are used in different languages. In the 1902 spelling reform, the German spelling was changed from "Thal" and "Thaler" to "Tal" and "Taler", which however did not affect the English spelling of "thaler". The later Dutch also carried the picture of a lion, which gave them the name ("lion thaler"). From an abbreviation of "leeuwendaalder" come the names of three present-day Balkan currencies, the Romanian and Moldovan Leu and the Bulgarian Lev.