Nick Broten: 7 books

Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of all time – and his ideas had a huge impact on the economic policies of governments across the world. A key theorist of capitalism and its relationship to democratic freedoms, Friedman remains one of the most cited authorities in...

Thomas Robert Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population helped change the direction of economics, politics, and the natural sciences with its reasoning and problem solving. The central topic of the essay was the idea, extremely prevalent in the 18th and 19th centuries, that human...

John P. Kotter’s Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail is a classic of business literature, and an example of high-level analysis and evaluation. In critical thinking, analysis is all about the sequence and features of arguments. When combined with evaluation of the strengths and...

Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 Road to Serfdom is a classic of conservative economic argument. While undeniably a product of a specific time in global politics – which saw the threat of fascism from Nazi Germany and its allies beguilingly answered by the promises of socialism – Hayek’s carefully constructed...

Thomas Piketty is a fine example of an evaluative thinker. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he not only provides detailed and sustained explanations of why he sees existing arguments relating to income and wealth distribution as flawed, but also gives us very detailed evaluations of the significance...

Today we take it for granted that history is much more than the story of great men and the elites from which they spring. Other forms of history – the histories of gender, class, rebellion and nonconformity – add much-needed context and color to our understanding of the past. But this has not...

Amartya Sen uses his 1999 work Development as Freedom to evaluate the processes and outcomes of economic development. Having come to the conclusion that development is best summed up as the expansion of freedom, Sen examines traditional definitions and understandings of the term. He says people...