better way of saying critical thinking

40 Of The Best Quotes About Critical Thinking

These quotes about critical thinking can be used to generate reflection, writing & discussion about critical thinking’s value in a society.

Here Are The Best Quotes About Critical Thinking

If we were to step inside 1,000 classrooms across the United States, how much critical thinking would we see?

We see ‘critical thinking’ name-dropped and splattered across school mission statements throughout the country. Elementary, middle, and high schools proclaim their commitment to cultivating critical thinkers, and recognize the importance of critical thinking skills that employers look for in potential employers. But to what extent are schools and teachers and curricula actually accomplishing the goal of developing lifelong learners who think critically?

Of all the dialogue spoken in a single class period, what percentage of it is worded in the form of questions, versus statements or directions?

Of the questions asked, to what degree do they promote, require, allow for, or otherwise nurture higher-level thinking?

We’ve curated a list of 40 quotes about critical thinking — the purpose of compiling this collection is to provide perspective on what critical thinking looks, sounds, and feels like (and what it doesn’t) so that educators and education leaders can cross-reference their curricular and instructional materials. In addition to inspiring teachers, these quotes about critical thinking might also be used as prompts to generate reflection, writing, and discussion among students about the value of critical thinking to a society, and what happens in a society where critical thinking is diminishing.

A. A. Milne: “The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. A second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. A first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.”

Adrienne Rich: “Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

Albert Einstein: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

Anaïs Nin: “When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.”

Anatole France: “An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.”

Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Bell Hooks: “Critical thinking requires us to use our imagination, seeing things from perspectives other than our own and envisioning the likely consequences of our position.”

Bertrand Russell: “The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.”

Carol Wade: “People can be extremely intelligent, have taken a critical thinking course, and know logic inside and out. Yet they may just become clever debaters, not critical thinkers, because they are unwilling to look at their own biases.”

Christopher Hitchens: “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

Confucius: “Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.”

Daniel Levitin: “Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in.”

Desmond Tutu: “My father used to say, ‘Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.”

Duke Ellington: “A problem is a chance for you to do your best.”

Elon Musk: “I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it is like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”

Howard Zinn: “We all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas.”

James Baldwin: “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”

Jean Piaget: “The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”

John Dewey: “Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.”

Jonathan Haidt: “We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board)..”

J. William Fulbright: “We must dare to think about ‘unthinkable things’ because when things become ‘unthinkable,’ thinking stops and action becomes mindless.”

Lawrence Balter: “You want to prepare your child to think as they get older. You want them to be critical in their judgments. Teaching a child, by your example, that there’s never any room for negotiating or making choices in life may suggest that you expect blind obedience, but it won’t help them, in the long run, to be discriminating in choices and thinking.”

Leo Tolstoy: “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for critical thinking.”

Marie Curie: “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”

Mason Cooley: “The critical spirit never knows when to stop meddling.”

Max Beerbohm: “The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions.”

Naomi Wolf: “Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience, and resourcefulness.”

Noam Chomsky: “I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions…Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes: “A mind stretched by new ideas never goes back to its original dimensions.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.”

Randi Weingarten: “Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doesn’t measure big-picture learning, critical thinking, perseverance, problem-solving, creativity, or curiosity; yet, those are the qualities great teaching brings out in a student.”

Richard Dawkins: “Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”

Richard Feynman: “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”

Robert Grudin: “To act vulgarly we must be ignorant not only of other people but of ourselves, not only of the nature of our action but of its ramifications in the world at large. To act vulgarly, we must indulge our own ignorance in large, mutually supportive groups. By vulgarity, I mean a comprehensive cultural laxity that spawns monstrosities and is fed by a corporate system that has abandoned long-term development in favor of quarterly profits, by media whose moral standards are based on viewer share, and by a system of higher education that has sold out its image of the humanities and critical thinking as the main bases for consciousness and values.”

Sadhguru: “When your mind is full of assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs, it has no penetration, it just repeats past impressions.”

Stanley Kubrick: “If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.”

Steve Jobs: “Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Terry Heick: “Critical thinking is certainly a ‘skill’ but when possessed as a mindset–a playful and humble willingness–it shifts from a labor to an art. It asks, ‘Is this true? By what standard?”

How about a quote for those considering a teaching job ? Thomas J. Watson, Sr.: “Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of crackpot than the stigma of conformity.”

Sir William Bragg: “The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”

William James: “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

After reading the quotes about critical thinking, which ones most resonate with you? Which quotes about critical thinking embody what you’re already doing well in the classroom? Which ones signal a need to revise your current approach or strategies?

TeachThought is an organization dedicated to innovation in education through the growth of outstanding teachers.

Critical thinking definition

Critical thinking, as described by Oxford Languages, is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement.

Active and skillful approach, evaluation, assessment, synthesis, and/or evaluation of information obtained from, or made by, observation, knowledge, reflection, acumen or conversation, as a guide to belief and action, requires the critical thinking process, which is why it's often used in education and academics.

Some even may view it as a backbone of modern thought.

However, it's a skill, and skills must be trained and encouraged to be used at its full potential.

People turn up to various approaches in improving their critical thinking, like:

• Developing technical and problem-solving skills
• Engaging in more active listening
• Actively questioning their assumptions and beliefs
• Seeking out more diversity of thought
• Opening up their curiosity in an intellectual way etc.

Is critical thinking useful in writing?

Critical thinking can help in planning your paper and making it more concise, but it's not obvious at first. We carefully pinpointed some the questions you should ask yourself when boosting critical thinking in writing:

• What information should be included?
• Which information resources should the author look to?
• What degree of technical knowledge should the report assume its audience has?
• What is the most effective way to show information?
• How should the report be organized?
• How should it be designed?
• What tone and level of language difficulty should the document have?

Usage of critical thinking comes down not only to the outline of your paper, it also begs the question: How can we use critical thinking solving problems in our writing's topic?

Let's say, you have a Powerpoint on how critical thinking can reduce poverty in the United States. You'll primarily have to define critical thinking for the viewers, as well as use a lot of critical thinking questions and synonyms to get them to be familiar with your methods and start the thinking process behind it.

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Critical Thinking: 25 Performance Review Phrases Examples

Critical thinking skills are an essential aspect of an employee’s evaluation: the ability to solve problems, analyze situations, and make informed decisions is crucial for the success of any organization.

Questions that can help you determine an employee’s rating for critical thinking:

• Does the employee consistently analyze data and information to identify patterns and trends?
• Does the employee proactively identify potential problems and develop solutions to mitigate them?
• Has the employee demonstrated the ability to think creatively and come up with innovative ideas or approaches?
• Does the employee actively seek out feedback and input from others to inform their decision-making process?
• Has the employee demonstrated the ability to make sound decisions based on available information and data?

Performance Review Phrases and Paragraphs Examples For Critical Thinking

5 – outstanding.

Employees with outstanding critical thinking skills are exceptional at identifying patterns, making connections, and using past experiences to inform their decisions.

Phrases Examples

• Consistently demonstrates exceptional critical thinking abilities
• Always finds creative and innovative solutions to complex problems
• Skilfully analyzes information and data to make well-informed decisions
• Frequently provides valuable insights and perspectives that benefit the team
• Continuously seeks out new learning opportunities to sharpen their critical thinking skills
• Demonstrates exceptional ability to identify and analyze complex issues
• Consistently develops innovative solutions to problems
• Skillfully connects disparate ideas to create coherent arguments
• Effectively communicates well-reasoned conclusions
• Exceptional ability to recognize trends in data
• Expertly applies existing knowledge to new situations
• Consistently anticipates potential challenges and develops solution

Paragraph Example 1

“Jane consistently demonstrates outstanding critical thinking skills in her role. She not only engages in deep analysis of complex information, but she also presents unique solutions to problems that have a significant positive impact on the team’s performance. Her ability to make well-informed decisions and offer valuable insights has led to numerous successes for the organization. Moreover, Jane’s dedication to improvement and learning demonstrates her commitment to personal and professional growth in the area of critical thinking.”

Paragraph Example 2

“Jessica consistently displays outstanding critical thinking skills. She is able to identify and analyze complex issues with ease and has demonstrated her ability to develop innovative solutions. Her skill in connecting disparate ideas to create coherent arguments is impressive, and she excels at communicating her well-reasoned conclusions to the team.”

Paragraph Example 3

“Melanie consistently demonstrates an exceptional ability to recognize patterns and trends in data, which has significantly contributed to the success of our projects. Her critical thinking skills allow her to apply her extensive knowledge and experience in creative and innovative ways, proactively addressing potential challenges and developing effective solutions.”

4 – Exceeds Expectations

Employees exceeding expectations in critical thinking skills are adept at analyzing information, making sound decisions, and providing thoughtful recommendations. They are also effective at adapting their knowledge to novel situations and displaying confidence in their abilities.

• Excellent analytical capabilities
• Provides well-reasoned recommendations
• Demonstrates a solid understanding of complex concepts
• Regularly demonstrates the ability to think analytically and critically
• Effectively identifies and addresses complex problems with well-thought-out solutions
• Shows exceptional skill in generating innovative ideas and solutions
• Exhibits a consistently high level of decision-making based on sound reasoning
• Proactively seeks out new information to improve critical thinking skills
• Routinely identifies potential challenges and provides solutions
• Typically recognizes and prioritizes the most relevant information
• Logical thinking is evident in daily decision-making
• Often weighs the pros and cons of multiple options before selecting a course of action

“Eric’s critical thinking skills have consistently exceeded expectations throughout his tenure at the company. He is skilled at reviewing and analyzing complex information, leading him to provide well-reasoned recommendations and insights. Eric regularly demonstrates a deep understanding of complicated concepts, which allows him to excel in his role.”

“In this evaluation period, Jane has consistently demonstrated an exceptional ability to think critically and analytically. She has repeatedly shown skill in identifying complex issues while working on projects and has provided well-thought-out and effective solutions. Her innovative ideas have contributed significantly to the success of several key initiatives. Moreover, Jane’s decision-making skills are built on sound reasoning, which has led to positive outcomes for the team and organization. Additionally, she actively seeks opportunities to acquire new information and apply it to her work, further strengthening her critical thinking capabilities.”

“John consistently exceeds expectations in his critical thinking abilities. He routinely identifies potential challenges and provides thoughtful solutions. He is skilled at recognizing and prioritizing the most relevant information to make well-informed decisions. John regularly weighs the pros and cons of various options and selects the best course of action based on logic.”

3 – Meets Expectations

Employees meeting expectations in critical thinking skills demonstrate an ability to analyze information and draw logical conclusions. They are effective at problem-solving and can make informed decisions with minimal supervision.

• Capable of processing information and making informed decisions
• Displays problem-solving skills
• Demonstrates logical thinking and reasoning
• Consistently demonstrates the ability to analyze problems and find possible solutions.
• Actively engages in group discussions and contributes valuable ideas.
• Demonstrates the ability to draw conclusions based on logical analysis of information.
• Shows willingness to consider alternative perspectives when making decisions.
• Weighs the pros and cons of a situation before reaching a decision.
• Usually identifies relevant factors when faced with complex situations
• Demonstrates an understanding of cause and effect relationships
• Generally uses sound reasoning to make decisions
• Listens to and considers different perspectives

“Sarah consistently meets expectations in her critical thinking skills, successfully processing information and making informed decisions. She has shown her ability to solve problems effectively and displays logical reasoning when approaching new challenges. Sarah continues to be a valuable team member thanks to these critical thinking skills.”

“Jane is a team member who consistently meets expectations in regards to her critical thinking skills. She demonstrates an aptitude for analyzing problems within the workplace and actively seeks out potential solutions by collaborating with her colleagues. Jane is open-minded and makes an effort to consider alternative perspectives during decision-making processes. She carefully weighs the pros and cons of the situations she encounters, which helps her make informed choices that align with the company’s objectives.”

“David meets expectations in his critical thinking skills. He can usually identify the relevant factors when dealing with complex situations and demonstrates an understanding of cause and effect relationships. David’s decision-making is generally based on sound reasoning, and he listens to and considers different perspectives before reaching a conclusion.”

2 – Needs Improvement

Employees in need of improvement in critical thinking skills may struggle with processing information and making logical conclusions. They may require additional guidance when making decisions or solving problems.

• Struggles with analyzing complex information
• Requires guidance when working through challenges
• Difficulty applying past experiences to new situations
• With some guidance, Jane is able to think critically, but she struggles to do so independently.
• John tends to jump to conclusions without analyzing a situation fully.
• Sarah’s problem-solving skills need improvement, as she often overlooks important information when making decisions.
• David’s critical thinking skills are limited and need further development to enhance his overall work performance.
• Occasionally struggles to identify and analyze problems effectively
• Inconsistently uses logic to make decisions
• Often overlooks important information or perspectives
• Requires guidance in weighing options and making judgments

“Bob’s critical thinking skills could benefit from further development and improvement. He often struggles when analyzing complex information and tends to need additional guidance when working through challenges. Enhancing Bob’s ability to apply his past experiences to new situations would lead to a notable improvement in his overall performance.”

“Jenny is a valuable team member, but her critical thinking skills need improvement before she will be able to reach her full potential. In many instances, Jenny makes decisions based on her first impressions without questioning the validity of her assumptions or considering alternative perspectives. Her tendency to overlook key details has led to several instances in which her solutions are ineffective or only partly beneficial. With focused guidance and support, Jenny has the potential to develop her critical thinking skills and make more informed decisions in the future.”

“Tom’s critical thinking skills require improvement. He occasionally struggles to identify and analyze problems effectively, and his decision-making is inconsistent in its use of logic. Tom often overlooks important information or perspectives and may require guidance in weighing options and making judgments.”

1 – Unacceptable

Employees with unacceptable critical thinking skills lack the ability to analyze information effectively, struggle with decision-making, and fail to solve problems without extensive support from others.

• Fails to draw logical conclusions from information
• Incapable of making informed decisions
• Unable to solve problems without extensive assistance
• Fails to analyze potential problems before making decisions
• Struggles to think critically and ask relevant questions
• Cannot effectively identify alternative solutions
• Lacks the ability to apply logic and reason in problem-solving situations
• Does not consistently seek input from others or gather information before making a decision
• Regularly fails to recognize or address important issues
• Makes hasty decisions without considering potential consequences
• Lacks objectivity and often relies on personal biases
• Resistant to alternative viewpoints and constructive feedback

“Unfortunately, Sue’s critical thinking skills have been consistently unacceptable. She fails to draw logical conclusions from available information and is incapable of making informed decisions. Sue has also shown that she is unable to solve problems without extensive assistance from others, which significantly impacts her performance and the team’s productivity.”

“Jane’s performance in critical thinking has been unacceptable. She often fails to analyze potential problems before making decisions and struggles to think critically and ask relevant questions. Jane’s inability to effectively identify alternative solutions and apply logic and reason in problem-solving situations has negatively impacted her work. Furthermore, she does not consistently seek input from others or gather information before making a decision. It is crucial for Jane to improve her critical thinking skills to become a more effective and valuable team member.”

“Susan’s critical thinking skills are unacceptable. She regularly fails to recognize and address important issues, and her decision-making is often hasty and without considering potential consequences. Susan frequently lacks objectivity and tends to rely on personal biases. She is resistant to alternative viewpoints and constructive feedback, which negatively affects her work performance.”

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The Magic Of Critical Thinking: How To Make Better Decisions

What do you think about the following drawing?

Not great, right?  Now consider the second drawing below by the same artist.  

The only difference is that the one on the left took 10 minutes to complete whereas the one on the right took only 12 seconds.

What if all your thoughts were only 12-second thoughts?  That is the world that would exist without critical thinking.

Critical thinking is not well understood.  We take it for granted that it is something that is a byproduct of going to school.  People say “you go to school to learn how to think” but show no evidence that this happens.  We assume critical thinking happens at work but we can’t explain how we do it.  How is something so central to the way we live in the modern world so poorly understood?  What do we mean by “critical thinking” and how one might improve such a skill?

John Dewey, the early 20th Century American Philosopher, is credited with inventing the term. Though you can trace the foundations of critical thinking back to Socrates who famously said, “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.” Dewey added that critical thinking is “suspended judgment, and the essence of this suspense is inquiry to determine the nature of the problem before proceeding to attempts at its solution.”

Critical thinking is only possible when you are able to recognize that your default impulses may not be correct and the possibility that there are many different approaches to analyzing a problem.  This essay explores critical thinking, how it is applied, identifies limitations, and a vital role in the consulting process.

What Is Critical Thinking?

The simplest definition of critical thinking is that it is space for thinking.  A pause or a delay in decision-making to consider additional possibilities.

The problem with defining critical thinking in a more detailed way is that it sends one in a circular loop.  It is hard to clearly say what we mean by “critical thinking” without referencing the process of thinking itself.  John Dewey is credited with being the person that brought attention to the idea of critical thinking and defined it as “suspended judgment; and the essence of this suspense is inquiry to determine the nature of the problem before proceeding to attempts at its solution.”

This process is not natural.  We are wired for survival and in today’s world, we have a hard time shifting away from the instincts that protect us and towards a slower and deliberative thought process.  Part of the reason for this is that many of our instincts and learned reactions are the right ones.  Jacob of the popular putanumonit blog argues that “The reason that intuition and social cognition are so commonly relied on is that they often work. Doing simply what feels right is usually good enough in every domain you either trained for (like playing basketball) or evolved for (like recoiling from snakes). Doing what is normal and fashionable among your peers is good enough in every domain your culture has mastered over time (like cooking techniques).” 

For things that humans haven’t figured out, like stopping or slowing the spread of a global pandemic, we need better tools than our intuition. 

Example: Critical Thinking In Consulting

Consulting at its best is an example of critical-thinking-as-a-service. Companies hire consulting firms because of their ability to deploy a rigorous problem-solving process to a wide range of problems.  This can be valuable for companies with a culture of reactivity and hasty decision-making.  Consulting firms can often help companies slow down and look at the big picture or look at something they are doing from a different perspective.  

The McKinsey problem-solving approach is one example and is been copied and altered by many companies in the business world. GE has its “workout” process.  Danaher has the “Danaher Business System.”  Toyota has the “Toyota Production System.”  The central element in all of these approaches is that they try to systematically embed critical thinking within the culture and day-to-day operations of a company.  

Critical Thinking Has Many Benefits

Critical thinking is a muscle that gets stronger over time with practice and, like exercise, there is pain before gain. In consulting many people struggle as they have to shift away from meeting the requirements of school reports to assessing ambiguous complex problems.

Critical Thinking Is Hard But Can Pay Off

Critical thinking sometimes means going against the crowd which can be socially costly but it  pays off, handsomely. 

Activist investor Michael Burry ’ applied critical thinking to analyze the US housing market prior to the 2008 global financial crisis. The depth of his analysis led him to believe that nearly everyone in the institutional class had an incorrect model of how much risk there was in the market. He identified there was much more systemic risk than anyone knew.  He bet on this and many of the investors punished his rebellion by demanding their money back.  They didn’t trust his conclusions because they were so different.  Those who stuck with him shared in almost a billion dollars in profit from one bet. Burry had been right.  Billion-dollar companies needed to be bailed out and he got rich. He wasn’t making many friends by disagreeing with the consensus, but you don’t need friends to be right.  

In reflecting on how this might happen, Burry said , “Sober analysis on the part of the individual is paramount. We must remember that entire societies can and often do follow the wrong path for a very long time.” Part of Burry’s worldview was that institutions can hold incorrect views, often for long periods of time.  This is in contrast to most people’s default reaction to an institutional opinion: trust.  

Burry was skeptical of that impulse and wanted to check the numbers himself. I bet he’s glad he did.

S ee things others don’t

It feels intuitive to say “Seatbelts save lives.” and this is now common knowledge but that was not always the case. 

Ralph Nader, lawyer, and consumer advocate fought a decades-long battle against auto insurers in order to shift public opinion.  His ideas were brought to the forefront through his book Unsafe At Any Speed that highlighted the shortcuts car manufacturers made during the production of cars which included no seatbelts.  Until Nader, most people saw crashes and fatalities as something that was a fact of nature and most people blamed crashes on human error.  Nader, a critical thinker, started with a different question.  He asked, “what might save the most lives?”, rather than starting with accepting the status quo. 

Nader saw what others didn’t, wrote about it, and saved lives. The effects of one person applying critical thinking can have an enormous impact.

It Has Compounding Benefits

People avoid critical thinking because it can be a frustrating process.  However, if you spend the time to develop a process for approaching problems that are beyond the capacity of your normal intuitions you will be able to move on to more challenging problems.  

Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek once commented that he tries to “… avoid hard work. When things look complicated, that is often a sign that there is a better way to do it. ” This is the secret sauce of any high-performing organization but can be hard to recognize if you were not there at the beginning.  Edgar Schein, one of the leading thinkers on corporate culture, defined culture as a group of people “who have been together long enough to have shared significant problems.”  An organization succeeds by taking the results of individual critical thinking and developing processes that can be implemented by others.  The better these rules are, the better the company is at solving the problems it faces in the market.  

Many companies default to taking as many clients or customers as they can find.  Yet when companies step back and analyze what clients or customers lead to the biggest impact on the bottom line, they often find that certain types of customers have an outsized effect.  Instead of simply defaulting to “more is better” a company might develop rules to determine who to say no to such that over the long term they have higher levels of growth.

It Enables You To Make Your Own Decisions

Critical thinking helps you protect yourself from attempts at manipulation and influence. In today’s world advertisers, companies, political groups, media companies, and apps are all using every tactic available to them to capture and keep your attention.  

Oatly is a drink company that has marketed its product with ads saying “like milk but for humans.”  When you see something like that you quickly start thinking about milk.  What’s wrong with milk?  Don’t millions of people drink it each day?

The critical thinker would step back and think about this from multiple perspectives:

• Milk: Are there issues with milk?  What is the evidence for milk being good or bad for us?  Are there different kinds of milk that might impact our assessment?
• Oatly: Oatly is a new product.  What is the right approach for thinking about a new product that doesn’t have long-term evidence in its favor?
• Milk vs. Oatly : What are the right models for thinking about comparing two different beverages, one new and one that has been on the market for a short period of time?

Critical thinkers  don’t take claims at face value.  They consider them based on a process of thinking.

Seeing The Signal From The Noise

Nate Silver is a world-class critical thinker.  However, the way the news media covers his predictions, showing them as “right” or wrong, is misleading.

Silver’s approach to polling is to develop a probabilistic prediction of different outcomes of elections.  He takes local, regional, and national polls, assesses them, and then develops a model of probable results.  In the 2008 election, he accurately predicted the results of 49 of 50 states and in 2012, predicted all 50 states correctly.  He was criticized in 2016 for incorrectly predicting the results of the election, but he had only given Hillary Clinton a 64.5% chance of winning the election, much lower than most other pollsters. 

Silver writes in his book about separating signal from noise, “The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.”  Prior to his approach to political polling gaining popularity, many political analysts relied on conventional wisdom and mental shortcuts.

Most of Silver’s critics are signaling that they are not strong critical thinkers. By applying critical thinking in his work, Silver has been able to consistently outperform other analysts.

How To Be A Critical Thinker

If there was a patron saint of critical thinking it would be Dr. Gregory House.  He is the star of the popular show “House,” in which he spends every episode trying to solve a medical mystery.

Each episode of the television show starts with a patient that has an undiagnosed condition. House and his team iterate through many different diagnoses and ways of thinking about the problem.  What makes House unique relative to our conventional idea of a doctor is that he is highly disagreeable.  This is highlighted in the show’s branding of “Everyone Lies.”  What they are really saying is that at the end of the day the truth prevails no matter what people think the answer should be.  He even challenges his team to discount his own theories while still pursuing the truth: “You could think I’m wrong, but that’s no reason to stop thinking?”

House is applying a rigorous process and the point is not to be immediately correct but to continue to raise the odds of success of various diagnoses by considering many possibilities and then eliminating them.  In medicine, a “differential diagnosis” is one way to do this.  It considers multiple potential explanations for a set of symptoms and then tests the simplest theories first before moving on to the harder to test explanations.  

Critical thinking is about developing methods of thinking that avoid taking shortcut and defaulting to easy answers.  In House’s case, this is the only way of doing his job well, as he sees the patient’s that other doctors have already given up on.  Rigorous critical thinking is not only core to his job, but it is a matter of life and death.

Deliberate and not so deliberate thoughts

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random. Thinking Fast and Slow

One of the best models for thinking about how we process information is through Daniel Kahneman’s breakdown of System 1 and System 2 thinking which he introduced in Thinking, fast and slow . 

System 1 refers to the kind of automatic reactions that we are wired with.  For the most part, these impulses do a good job of keeping us alive.  System 2 involves the slower, more calculated decisions.  This is where critical thinking happens.

Yet getting into this state is hard.  As Kahneman writes, 

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

When we are able to shift our brains into system two thinking, that is where the magic happens and this will lead you to do the kind of work that people are gladly willing to pay for.

Consultants get criticized for creating “obvious” presentations. In some cases, consulting firms do fail to add much insight to a situation.  Yet in the best case, the presentation is only obvious in the sense that it is the result of a slow, deliberative process to develop clear ideas and takeaways for a specific audience.  The audience may sit there and think “wow this is so simple” but in the back of their mind there will be a little bit of a question, “how did they do that?”  

Train Yourself To Be More Aware

Mindfulness is a proven way to become more aware of your thinking process.  Research has shown that mindfulness, “involves two distinct dispositions, present-moment attentional focus and non-reactive monitoring.”  Non-reactive monitoring can also be seen as something Psychologists call executive function which covers three actions of the mind: “updating, inhibition and shifting.” 

• Updating : Active “revision and monitoring” as new information emerges 
• Inhibition : A suppression or skepticism of emergent thoughts
• Shifting : going back and forth between tasks

Research has shown that with practice, mindfulness is something we can get better at and the “executive control skills of inhibition and updating were found to be positively related to critical thinking.”  Which is to say, training our minds to go slower can make us better at critical thinking.

Leverage Mental Models When Appropriate

Mental models condense entire textbooks or swaths of knowledge into simple, digestible, and friendly cognitive tools that change how we take on new problems. Shane Parrish, who studies mental models, explains , “Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.”

In a sense they are shortcuts.  Taken at face value, they can help us shortcut the hard and rigorous critical thinking process.  But if we work backward and use them as starting points for developing our own knowledge about a situation, they can accelerate critical thinking.  Charlie Munger, the patron saint of mental models, suggests that we need to develop our own models of how the world works: “ the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”  Mental models are turning information into actionable ways of navigating the world, making decisions, and getting things right.

Thought experiments are common mental models we use to test out ideas and facts. One of the most intriguing mental models is Schrodinger’s cat. In quantum mechanics, particles can exist in many states at the same time and are reduced to one state when something interacts with it. Schrodinger’s cat represents a thought experiment of a cat in an unopened box being bombarded by radiation. The radiation will eventually kill the cat but we cannot see in an unopened box so we do not “know” that this really exists. The cat exists in two states: dead or alive, and only one can be observed when the box is opened.

The thought experiment demonstrates a mental model of understanding “quantum mechanical theory” that would otherwise be inaccessible because very few humans are going to derive the principles from scratch.  Instead, they can start with the mental model and then decide to dig deeper to understand what the theory is all about.

Charlie Munger argues that learning a wide range of mental models enables you to tap into a vault of “checklists of things to think about before he acted; and that he had mechanisms in his mind to evoke these, and bring these to his conscious attention when the situations for decisions arose.”

The Challenges Of Critical Thinking In Organizations

A challenge in consulting is that you are influenced by other people.  It can become easy to fall into groupthink and start to agree with the prevailing wisdom of your client or team members.  Yet this is not what consultants are paid to do.  They are paid to get to the best answer or set of answers to a problem regardless.  

At McKinsey one of the things they do to make sure that groupthink doesn’t prevail is to embrace the value of “obligation to dissent.”   A former McKinsey consultant Victor Ho, highlighted this playing out as  “the youngest, most junior person in any given meeting is the most capable to disagree with the most senior person in the room.”

In consulting, critical thinking is a process to be respected at all costs, and building a culture to protect that value is vital to success. One reason why so many consultants are able to develop strong critical thinking skills is that the organizations and client teams are oriented around learning.  A lot of this happens because of the way consultants work in teams.  People are dedicated to finding the best answers and our colleagues spend time pointing out errors or biases in our thinking.  This kind of teamwork takes a high amount of trust. 

It may be one thing to identify a way your company can make more money but another when that decision would put you at odds with the senior leaders of your organization who are in favor of a more popular approach. Social desirability bias , or in human language, making sure your boss likes you, is a real challenge for many people to get better at critical thinking.  When you are in these situations, the best thing to do is to look for a way out and to find a team, organization, or situation that will help you learn to become a better thinker.  

Make Your Life More Fun

If you are able to hardness this at an individual level, you can gain an unfair advantage, something Munger argued in a 2007 speech at USC law school :

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up, and boy, does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you. … So if civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning. Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning. I went through life constantly practicing (because if you don’t practice it, you lose it) the multidisciplinary approach and I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun, it’s made me more constructive, it’s made me more helpful to others, and it’s made me enormously rich. You name it, that attitude really helps.

Munger embraces not only critical thinking but the desire to get better at it, forever.  Many of the incentives of organizations convince us that critical thinking is not worth it and our natural impulses convince us we are right when we are simply creating patterns in our mind.  By embracing a more deliverable approach and falling in love with the process of getting better at it, we can not only make better decisions but as Munger says, make life “more fun.”

Do you have a toolkit for business problem solving? I created Think Like a Strategy Consultant as an online course to make the tools of strategy consultants accessible to driven professionals, executives, and consultants. This course teaches you how to synthesize information into compelling insights, structure your information in ways that help you solve problems, and develop presentations that resonate at the C-Level. Click here to learn more or if you are interested in getting started now, enroll in the self-paced version ($497) or hands-on coaching version ($997). Both versions include lifetime access and all future updates.

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Critical Thinking Skills for Resume: Definition, Importance Examples

It’s no secret that employers want adaptable people, who can solve problems, and contribute to the organization’s success. The difference between an employee who can do these things and one who can’t comes down to one simple thing: they have strong critical thinking skills.

So of course you’d want to tout these on your resume and all over your job application materials too. There’s one problem, though. Critical skills aren’t always easy to put on paper. But there are a few ‘workarounds’ this post will show you! 

What Are Critical Thinking Skills?

Critical thinking skills stand for your ability to rationally process information, find connections between ideas, reflect, and draw conclusions. You use critical thinking skills in the workplace to solve problems, collaborate with others, resolve conflicts, and complete many other everyday tasks.

To give you a better idea, here are several critical thinking skills examples : 

• Analysis of information for relevancy and accuracy. Strong fact-checking abilities. 
• Critical self-reflection and introspection to eliminate bias or flawed assumptions. 
• Using available data to formulate effective, empathetic, and rational solutions to problems.
• Integrating different information sources and perspectives to form a coherent understanding of an issue. 
• Recognition of fallacies: Ability to spot and eliminate flaws in arguments, assessments, and suggested solutions. 
• Brainstorming multiple approaches to a problem and evaluating their potential effectiveness.

Generally, critical thinking falls into the broader category of conceptual skills — your cognitive abilities to transform abstract problems into concrete solutions. Critical thinking skills also form the base of your analytical skills — a broader range of abilities to perceive, process, and assimilate information. 

Why Are Critical Thinking Skills In Demand By Employers

Employers find ‘soft skills’ like critical thinking in short supply: 78% of employers rank 

critical thinking/analytic reasoning is the most important workplace competency, but only 34% of college graduates they interview are well-prepared in this department. 

At the same time, 93% of employers state that they value strong critical thinking skills over the candidate’s undergraduate degree. Why so? 

Put simply, critical thinking indicates your ability to make good decisions — a competency required for almost every role. 

Critical thinkers can effectively assess the available information and synthesize the best plan of action, based on analyzed data and personal experience.  On the other hand, people with poor critical-thinking skills may be more prone to drawing fast conclusions on incomplete or unreliable data, and rely on ‘hunches’ or personal biases.

The knowledge economy, we now operate in, also puts a premium on human capital. Simple menial work can be done by algorithms and smart manufacturing equipment. However, we still need humans to supervise, develop, and oversee the execution. Another study also argues that people with strong critical thinking skills are less likely to get displaced from their jobs by emerging technologies. 

The bottom line: Critical thinking is 81% of employers already highly valued today and one that prepares you well for the future of work. 

List Of Critical Thinking Skills For Your Resume

Let’s be real: you won’t convince hiring managers by simply stating, ‘I have strong critical thinking skills’ in your cover letter . It’s a fact you need to demonstrate via your duties and accomplishments. The best way to do so is to share specific critical thinking skills examples on your resume. 

Analysis stands for your ability to effectively deal with incoming information and translate it into insights. To analyze things properly, you must know how to source information, verify that it is valid, determine which data is relevant, and take an objective approach to draw conclusions based on that information.

How to demonstrate this critical thinking skill on a resume: 

From a project coordinator resume example : 

Employed a Checklist-Oriented Requirement Analysis (CORA) framework to analyze project requirements, map dependencies, identify possible constraints, and develop contingency plans.

Observation

Observation involves having a heightened awareness of your surroundings, understanding what you observe, and knowing the appropriate action to take. For example, they may notice a downward trend in productivity, and take action to address potential staffing issues.

How to add this critical thinking skill to a resume: 

From a teacher’s resume example : 

Observed students’ performance on standardized English language tests versus creating assignments to better understand the impact of each on information retention and improve my teaching strategies.

Inference indicates your ability to draw conclusions based on a limited set of data. For example, the manager of a community pool may infer that an unseasonably hot day will mean that more people will order cold drinks from the concession stand. Combined with business acumen , interference often helps bring more creative ideas and accelerate innovation. 

How to demonstrate such critical thinking skills on a resume

From a digital marketing manager resume example : 

Increase the ROAS from digital out-of-home ad campaigns by 25%, by a new customer cohort of ‘eco-conscious consumers” and adjusting the messaging for them in key locations.

Problem-Solving

The ability to strategize and evaluate a solution after it has been implemented is the essence of problem-solving skills. Problem-solving requires that you can look at a problem objectively, and think through potential solutions in a methodical manner. 

Although employers are the most likely to assess this skill with problem-solving interview questions , it’s still worth including a short mention on your resume too, especially for roles that require quick thinking. 

How to demonstrate problem-solving skills on a resume: 

From an administrative assistant resume example :

Helped organize a 1,000 sales rep conference on a 3-week deadline, despite facing venue cancelations and two last-moment speaker cancellations. 

Communication

The ability to effectively collaborate with others, discuss problems, give and receive feedback are critical skills for every hire. Show the employer that you can hold productive exchanges with people who don’t always agree with you, be persuasive, and critically process all the information others are sharing with you. 

How to demonstrate strong communication skills on a resume: 

From a program manager resume example : 

Successfully led change management efforts, helping transition over 500 employees to a new EHR system. Addressed initial cultural resistance among staff via a series of workshops, personalized demo sessions, and group training, as well as ‘employee advocate’ initiatives.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinkers can draw data from the past and present to anticipate future implications of their actions and engineer effective plans to achieve targeted goals. This critical-thinking skill is especially important for anyone in managerial or executive roles as you’d be primarily expected to formulate and oversee different corporate objectives. 

How to demonstrate strategic thinking on a resume

From a Chief Financial Officer resume example :

Spreadheded the effort to re-engineer the procurement function. Developed and executed a strategy, aimed at improving supplier assessments, onboarding, and payments, as well as the general purchase order cycle. Reduced the average purchase time for new materials by 25% and achieved bottom-line improvements of $250k annually.

Critical Evaluation

Critical evaluation indicates your ability to assess the accuracy, validity, and relevancy of information available to you. Much of the information today is accessed online and often comes from questionable sources. 

It takes a combination of digital literacy and critical thinking skills for workers to discern which information is reliable, and what can be dismissed as pseudo-science, fake news, marketing talk, propaganda, or highly speculative thinking. 

How to demonstrate this critical thinking skill on a resume

From a personal banker resume example:

Educate customers on the risks associated with investments in so-called “hyped” stocks, as well as penny-stock trading. Suggest more sustainable, value-oriented investment strategies, based on their financial goals.

Continuous Learning 

Continuous learning indicates your commitment to self-improvement. Although it’s a less direct demonstration of strong critical-thinking skills, it is still a valid indicator of your ability to effectively navigate the available information, identify emerging themes on the market, and translate these into new professional knowledge. 

From a personal trainer resume example : 

Completed Precision Nutrition Certification Level 1 certification in 2023 to help clients develop appropriate dietary regiments to ensure faster muscle gain naturally.

How To Improve Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is a “muscle” you can train by being more deliberate about how you process information, build logical arguments, and catch some biases in your thinking. If you need some training, start building the following habits: 

• Practice information analysis: When trying to solve a problem, focus on getting all the necessary data first. Then, evaluate which ‘intel’ is accurate, important, and fit for purpose. Toss other findings and work with what’s left. 
• Learn to give recommendations: Recommendations are synthesized findings — a feasible, data- or experience-based solution. Learn to formulate all your recommendations based on the above. 
• Challenge your biases : Everyone is prone to preconceived notions and assumptions. Unfortunately, these get in the way of critical thinking. Learn to recognize your own biases, and make a dedicated effort to put those aside when you innovate and solve problems.
• Cultivate media literacy skills. When reading your favorite publishers, pay attention to how they make different claims. Are they guilty of exaggerating the problem by citing super-bold, but underrepresenative claims? What do other sources about the same topic? What types of sources do they cite? Are these credible and reliable? Learning to analyze how information is presented helps you develop sharper critical thinking skills. 

Critical thinking skills are key for effective decision-making, smooth collaboration, and personal efficiency — a triumvirate of in-demand skills among employers. Today, these skills are crucial for working with data, solving emerging market problems, and discerning truth from a growing volume of unproven information, circulating online. Tomorrow, critical thinking will become even more important as the future workforce will be primarily focused on knowledge work.

Elena runs content operations at Freesumes since 2017. She works closely with copywriters, designers, and invited career experts to ensure that all content meets our highest editorial standards. Up to date, she wrote over 200 career-related pieces around resume writing, career advice... more

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Synonyms of critical

• as in particular
• as in urgent
• as in crucial
• as in essential
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Thesaurus Definition of critical

Synonyms & Similar Words

• hypercritical
• overcritical
• faultfinding
• discriminating
• unforgiving
• pettifogging
• uncharitable

Antonyms & Near Antonyms

• undiscriminating
• undemanding
• importunate
• necessitous
• life - and - death
• life - or - death
• unimportant
• noncritical
• low - pressure
• nonthreatening
• fundamental
• instrumental
• indispensable
• insignificant
• inconsequential
• must - have
• all - important
• of the essence
• prerequisite
• significant
• substantial
• consequential
• nonelective
• unnecessary
• nonessential
• dispensable
• unessential
• inessential
• superfluous

Try This Instead

Synonym chooser.

How does the adjective critical contrast with its synonyms?

Some common synonyms of critical are captious , carping , censorious , faultfinding , and hypercritical . While all these words mean "inclined to look for and point out faults and defects," critical may also imply an effort to see a thing clearly and truly in order to judge it fairly.

When might captious be a better fit than critical ?

While the synonyms captious and critical are close in meaning, captious suggests a readiness to detect trivial faults or raise objections on trivial grounds.

Where would carping be a reasonable alternative to critical ?

The synonyms carping and critical are sometimes interchangeable, but carping implies an ill-natured or perverse picking of flaws.

When could censorious be used to replace critical ?

The words censorious and critical can be used in similar contexts, but censorious implies a disposition to be severely critical and condemnatory.

When can faultfinding be used instead of critical ?

Although the words faultfinding and critical have much in common, faultfinding implies a querulous or exacting temperament.

When is it sensible to use hypercritical instead of critical ?

The words hypercritical and critical are synonyms, but do differ in nuance. Specifically, hypercritical suggests a tendency to judge by unreasonably strict standards.

Examples of critical in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'critical.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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Cite this entry.

“Critical.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/critical. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

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Critical Thinking: 40 Useful Performance Feedback Phrases

Critical Thinking: Use these sample phrases to craft meaningful performance evaluations, drive change and motivate your workforce.

Critical Thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally while understanding the logical connection between ideas in a reflective and independent thinking.

Critical Thinking: Exceeds Expectations Phrases

• Highly demonstrates assertive and decisive ability when finding solutions for problems.
• Knows how to communicate ideas and issues easily in a very clear and concise manner.
• Able to piece together elements and come up with proper deductions on issues.
• Knows how to clarify problems and solutions easily so that other people can understand.
• Evaluates ideas and opinions in an unbiased manner without favoritism.
• Thinks through issues in a very logical manner that results in finding the best solution to a problem.
• Demonstrates excellent problem-solving skills by accessing a problem and devising the best possible solution for it.
• Takes in into consideration different and varied perspectives when solving problems.
• Examines the implications and possible consequences to any particular action carefully.
• Solves problems one by one so as not to mix up issues and ideas.

Critical Thinking: Meets Expectations Phrases

• Uses strategic approachability and skill when it comes to solving issues.
• Demonstrates well assertive and decisive ability when it comes to handling problems.
• Tries to always consider all factors at play before deciding on a particular methods or way.
• Gathers all the required facts and figures before starting to solve a particular problem.
• Always seeks to ask questions as a form of finding a sound basis to solving a problem.
• Not afraid to make mistakes and tries to find creative ways to handle any issue.
• Looks at issues in different angles and not in a one-sided way.
• Shows great flexibility when it comes to changing strategies and tact while dealing with different problems.
• Questions regularly to find out if the decision taken will achieve the desired effect.
• Always feels comfortable and confident when seeking help or advice whenever stuck on solving any issue.

Critical Thinking: Needs Improvement Phrases

• Does not take the time to consider all factors available before making a decision carefully.
• Looks at issues in a one-sided manner instead of having different varied ways of looking at it.
• Finds it challenging to arrive at a concrete conclusion after undertaking any evaluation.
• Not willing to do proper research and relies on outdated data and information.
• Does not demonstrate a curious type of attitude to try to find out a little bit more on issues.
• Not willing to accept corrections and take calculated risks when necessary.
• Does not show enough willingness to try to improve the critical thinking skills.
• Does not present ideas and points in a logical order or outline.
• Looks at issues in a biased and unfair way by not evaluating all factors.
• Not willing and inflexible to change tact or strategy when the initial plan fails to achieve the desired effect

Critical Thinking: Self Evaluation Questions

• How well do you research and gather facts and information before solving an issue?
• Give an instance you hurriedly made a decision without thinking it through and what was the result?
• Elaborate on a given occasion that you made the best decision. How did you feel about it?
• How well do you consider all the factors available before making your decision?
• Do you get to appreciate and learn from your mistakes and how do you deal with making wrong decisions?
• Do you always try to inquire further, what could be the missing elements that could achieve a positive outcome?
• How well do you consider having a concrete conclusion when presenting your ideas?
• When expressing your ideas do you deliver them in a logical manner?
• Do you usually look at issues in a one-sided manner or at different angles?
• How flexible are you when it comes to trying different ways of solving problems other than the intended way.

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39 Different Ways to Say ‘In Conclusion’ in an Essay (Rated)

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Learn about our Editorial Process

The phrase “In conclusion …” sounds reductive, simple and … well, just basic.

You can find better words to conclude an essay than that!

So below I’ve outlined a list of different ways to say in conclusion in an essay using a range of analysis verbs . Each one comes with an explanation of the best time to use each phrase and an example you could consider.

Read Also: How to Write a Conclusion using the 5C’s Method

List of Ways to Say ‘In Conclusion’ in an Essay

The following are the best tips I have for to say in conclusion in an essay.

1. The Weight of the Evidence Suggests…

My Rating: 10/10

Overview: This is a good concluding phrase for an evaluative essay where you need to compare two different positions on a topic then conclude by saying which one has more evidence behind it than the other.

You could also use this phrase for argumentative essays where you’ve put forward all the evidence for your particular case.

Example: “The weight of the evidence suggests that climate change is a real phenomenon.”

2. A Thoughtful Analysis would Conclude…

My Rating: 9/10

Overview: I would use this phrase in either an argumentative essay or a comparison essay. As an argument, it highlights that you think your position is the most logical.

In a comparison essay, it shows that you have (or have intended to) thoughtfully explore the issue by looking at both sides.

Example: “A thoughtful analysis would conclude that there is substantial evidence highlighting that climate change is real.”

Related Article: 17+ Great Ideas For An Essay About Yourself

3. A Balanced Assessment of the Above Information…

Overview: This phrase can be used to show that you have made a thoughtful analysis of the information you found when researching the essay. You’re telling your teacher with this phrase that you have looked at all sides of the argument before coming to your conclusion.

Example: “A balanced assessment of the above information would be that climate change exists and will have a strong impact on the world for centuries to come.”

4. Across the Board…

My Rating: 5/10

Overview: I would use this phrase in a less formal context such as in a creative discussion but would leave it out of a formal third-person essay. To me, the phrase comes across as too colloquial.

Example: “Across the board, there are scientists around the world who consistently provide evidence for human-induced climate change.”

5. Logically…

My Rating: 7/10

Overview: This phrase can be used at the beginning of any paragraph that states out a series of facts that will be backed by clear step-by-step explanations that the reader should be able to follow to a conclusion.

Example: “Logically, the rise of the automobile would speed up economic expansion in the United States. Automobiles allowed goods to flow faster around the economy.

6. After all is Said and Done…

Overview: This is a colloquial term that is more useful in a speech than written text. If you feel that the phrase ‘In conclusion,’ is too basic, then I’d also avoid this term. However, use in speech is common, so if you’re giving a speech, it may be more acceptable.

Example: “After all is said and done, it’s clear that there is more evidence to suggest that climate change is real than a hoax.”

7. All in All…

Overview: ‘All in all’ is a colloquial term that I would use in speech but not in formal academic writing. Colloquialisms can show that you have poor command of the English language. However, I would consider using this phrase in the conclusion of a debate.

Example: “All in all, our debate team has shown that there is insurmountable evidence that our side of the argument is correct.”

8. All Things Considered…

My Rating: 6/10

Overview: This term is a good way of saying ‘I have considered everything above and now my conclusion is..’ However, it is another term that’s more commonly used in speech than writing. Use it in a high school debate, but when it comes to a formal essay, I would leave it out.

Example: “All things considered, there’s no doubt in my mind that climate change is man-made.”

9. As a Final Note…

My Rating: 3/10

Overview: This phrase gives me the impression that the student doesn’t understand the point of a conclusion. It’s not to simply make a ‘final note’, but to summarize and reiterate. So, I would personally avoid this one.

Example: “As a final note, I would say that I do think the automobile was one of the greatest inventions of the 20 th Century.”

10. As Already Stated…

My Rating: 2/10

Overview: I don’t like this phrase. It gives teachers the impression that you’re going around in circles and haven’t organized your essay properly. I would particularly avoid it in the body of an essay because I always think: “If you already stated it, why are you stating it again?” Of course, the conclusion does re-state things, but it also adds value because it also summarizes them. So, add value by using a phrase such as ‘summarizing’ or ‘weighing up’ in your conclusion instead.

Example: “As already stated, I’m going to repeat myself and annoy my teacher.”

11. At present, the Best Evidence Suggests…

My Rating: 8/10

Overview: In essays where the evidence may change in the future. Most fields of study do involve some evolution over time, so this phrase acknowledges that “right now” the best evidence is one thing, but it may change in the future. It also shows that you’ve looked at the latest information on the topic.

Example: “At present, the best evidence suggests that carbon dioxide emissions from power plants is the greatest influence on climate change.”

12. At the Core of the Issue…

Overview: I personally find this phrase to be useful for most essays. It highlights that you are able to identify the most important or central point from everything you have examined. It is slightly less formal than some other phrases on this list, but I also wouldn’t consider it too colloquial for an undergraduate essay.

Example: “At the core of the issue in this essay is the fact scientists have been unable to convince the broader public of the importance of action on climate change.”

13. Despite the shortcomings of…

Overview: This phrase can be useful in an argumentative essay. It shows that there are some limitations to your argument, but , on balance you still think your position is the best. This will allow you to show critical insight and knowledge while coming to your conclusion.

Often, my students make the mistake of thinking they can only take one side in an argumentative essay. On the contrary, you should be able to highlight the limitations of your point-of-view while also stating that it’s the best.

Example: “Despite the shortcomings of globalization, this essay has found that on balance it has been good for many areas in both the developed and developing world.”

14. Finally…

My Rating: 4/10

Overview: While the phrase ‘Finally,’ does indicate that you’re coming to the end of your discussion, it is usually used at the end of a list of ideas rather than in a conclusion. It also implies that you’re adding a point rather that summing up previous points you have made.

Example: “Finally, this essay has highlighted the importance of communication between policy makers and practitioners in order to ensure good policy is put into effect.”

15. Gathering the above points together…

Overview: While this is not a phrase I personally use very often, I do believe it has the effect of indicating that you are “summing up”, which is what you want out of a conclusion.

Example: “Gathering the above points together, it is clear that the weight of evidence highlights the importance of action on climate change.”

16. Given the above information…

Overview: This phrase shows that you are considering the information in the body of the piece when coming to your conclusion. Therefore, I believe it is appropriate for starting a conclusion.

Example: “Given the above information, it is reasonable to conclude that the World Health Organization is an appropriate vehicle for achieving improved health outcomes in the developing world.”

17. In a nutshell…

Overview: This phrase means to say everything in the fewest possible words. However, it is a colloquial phrase that is best used in speech rather than formal academic writing.

Example: “In a nutshell, there are valid arguments on both sides of the debate about socialism vs capitalism.”

18. In closing…

Overview: This phrase is an appropriate synonym for ‘In conclusion’ and I would be perfectly fine with a student using this phrase in their essay. Make sure you follow-up by explaining your position based upon the weight of evidence presented in the body of your piece

Example: “In closing, there is ample evidence to suggest that liberalism has been the greatest force for progress in the past 100 years.”

19. In essence…

Overview: While the phrase ‘In essence’ does suggest you are about to sum up the core findings of your discussion, it is somewhat colloquial and is best left for speech rather than formal academic writing.

Example: “In essence, this essay has shown that cattle farming is an industry that should be protected as an essential service for our country.”

20. In review…

Overview: We usually review someone else’s work, not our own. For example, you could review a book that you read or a film you watched. So, writing “In review” as a replacement for “In conclusion” comes across a little awkward.

Example: “In review, the above information has made a compelling case for compulsory military service in the United States.”

21. In short…

Overview: Personally, I find that this phrase is used more regularly by undergraduate student. As students get more confident with their writing, they tend to use higher-rated phrases from this list. Nevertheless, I would not take grades away from a student for using this phrase.

Example: “In short, this essay has shown the importance of sustainable agriculture for securing a healthy future for our nation.”

22. In Sum…

Overview: Short for “In summary”, the phrase “In sum” sufficiently shows that you are not coming to the moment where you will sum up the essay. It is an appropriate phrase to use instead of “In conclusion”.

But remember to not just summarize but also discuss the implications of your findings in your conclusion.

Example: “In sum, this essay has shown the importance of managers in ensuring efficient operation of medium-to-large enterprises.”

23. In Summary…

Overview: In summary and in sum are the same terms which can be supplemented for “In conclusion”. You will show that you are about to summarize the points you said in the body of the essay, which is what you want from an essay.

Example: “In summary, reflection is a very important metacognitive skill that all teachers need to master in order to improve their pedagogical skills.”

24. It cannot be conclusively stated that…

Overview: While this phrase is not always be a good fit for your essay, when it is, it does show knowledge and skill in writing. You would use this phrase if you are writing an expository essay where you have decided that there is not enough evidence currently to make a firm conclusion on the issue.

Example: “It cannot be conclusively stated that the Big Bang was when the universe began. However, it is the best theory so far, and none of the other theories explored in this essay have as much evidence behind them.”

25. It is apparent that…

Overview: The term ‘ apparent ’ means that something is ‘clear’ or even ‘obvious’. So, you would use this word in an argumentative essay where you think you have put forward a very compelling argument.

Example: “It is apparent that current migration patterns in the Americas are unsustainable and causing significant harm to the most vulnerable people in our society.”

26. Last but not least…

Overview: The phrase “last but not least” is a colloquial idiom that is best used in speech rather than formal academic writing. Furthermore, when you are saying ‘last’, you mean to say you’re making your last point rather than summing up all your points you already made. So, I’d avoid this one.

Example: “Last but not least, this essay has highlighted the importance of empowering patients to exercise choice over their own medical decisions.”

27. Overall…

My Rating: 7.5/10

Overview: This phrase means ‘taking everything into account’, which sounds a lot like what you would want to do in an essay. I don’t consider it to be a top-tier choice (which is why I rated it 7), but in my opinion it is perfectly acceptable to use in an undergraduate essay.

Example: “Overall, religious liberty continues to be threatened across the world, and faces significant threats in the 21 st Century.”

28. The above points illustrate…

Overview: This phrase is a good start to a conclusion paragraph that talks about the implications of the points you made in your essay. Follow it up with a statement that defends your thesis you are putting forward in the essay.

Example: “The above points illustrate that art has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on humanity since the renaissance.”

29. The evidence presented in this essay suggests that…

Overview: I like this phrase because it highlights that you are about to gather together the evidence from the body of the essay to put forward a final thesis statement .

Example: “The evidence presented in this essay suggests that the democratic system of government is the best for securing maximum individual liberty for citizens of a nation.”

30. This essay began by stating…

Overview: This phrase is one that I teach in my YouTube mini-course as an effective one to use in an essay conclusion. If you presented an interesting fact in your introduction , you can return to that point from the beginning of the essay to provide nice symmetry in your writing.

Example: “This essay began by stating that corruption has been growing in the Western world. However, the facts collected in the body of the essay show that institutional checks and balances can sufficiently minimize this corruption in the long-term.”

31. This essay has argued…

Overview: This term can be used effectively in an argumentative essay to provide a summary of your key points. Follow it up with an outline of all your key points, and then a sentence about the implications of the points you made. See the example below.

Example: “This essay has argued that standardized tests are damaging for students’ mental health. Tests like the SATs should therefore be replaced by project-based testing in schools.”

32. To close…

Overview: This is a very literal way of saying “In conclusion”. While it’s suitable and serves its purpose, it does come across as being a sophomoric term. Consider using one of the higher-rated phrases in this list.

Example: “To close, this essay has highlighted both the pros and cons of relational dialectics theory and argued that it is not the best communication theory for the 21 st Century.”

33. To Conclude…

Overview: Like ‘to close’ and ‘in summary’, the phrase ‘to conclude’ is very similar to ‘in conclusion’. It can therefore be used as a sufficient replacement for that term. However, as with the above terms, it’s just okay and you could probably find a better phrase to use.

Example: “To conclude, this essay has highlighted that there are multiple models of communication but there is no one perfect theory to explain each situation.”

34. To make a long story short…

My Rating: 1/10

Overview: This is not a good phrase to use in an academic essay. It is a colloquialism. It also implies that you have been rambling in your writing and you could have said everything more efficiently. I would personally not use this phrase.

Example: “To make a long story short, I don’t have very good command of academic language.”

35. To Sum up…

Overview: This phrase is the same as ‘In summary’. It shows that you have made all of your points and now you’re about to bring them all together in a ‘summary’. Just remember in your conclusion that you need to do more than summarize but also talk about the implications of your findings. So you’ll need to go beyond just a summary.

Example: “In summary, there is ample evidence that linear models of communication like Lasswell’s model are not as good at explaining 21 st Century communication as circular models like the Osgood-Schramm model .”

36. Ultimately…

Overview: While this phrase does say that you are coming to a final point – also known as a conclusion – it’s also a very strong statement that might not be best to use in all situations. I usually accept this phrase from my undergraduates, but for my postgraduates I’d probably suggest simply removing it.

Example: “Ultimately, new media has been bad for the world because it has led to the spread of mistruths around the internet.”

37. Undoubtedly…

Overview: If you are using it in a debate or argumentative essay, it can be helpful. However, in a regular academic essay, I would avoid it. We call this a ‘booster’, which is a term that emphasizes certainty. Unfortunately, certainty is a difficult thing to claim, so you’re better off ‘hedging’ with phrases like ‘It appears’ or ‘The best evidence suggests’.

Example: “Undoubtedly, I know everything about this topic and am one hundred percent certain even though I’m just an undergraduate student.”

38. Weighing up the facts, this essay finds…

Overview: This statement highlights that you are looking at all of the facts both for and against your points of view. It shows you’re not just blindly following one argument but being careful about seeing things from many perspectives.

Example: “Weighing up the facts, this essay finds that reading books is important for developing critical thinking skills in childhood.”

39. With that said…

Overview: This is another phrase that I would avoid. This is a colloquialism that’s best used in speech rather than writing. It is another term that feels sophomoric and is best to avoid. Instead, use a more formal term such as: ‘Weighing up the above points, this essay finds…’

Example: “With that said, this essay disagrees with the statement that you need to go to college to get a good job.”

Do you Need to Say Anything?

Something I often tell my students is: “Can you just remove that phrase?”

Consider this sentence:

• “In conclusion, the majority of scientists concur that climate change exists.”

Would it be possible to simply say:

• “ In conclusion, The majority of scientists concur that climate change exists.”

So, I’d recommend also just considering removing that phrase altogether! Sometimes the best writing is the shortest, simplest writing that gets to the point without any redundant language at all.

How to Write an Effective Conclusion

Before I go, I’d like to bring your attention to my video on ‘how to write an effective conclusion’. I think it would really help you out given that you’re looking for help on how to write a conclusion. It’s under 5 minutes long and has helped literally thousands of students write better conclusions for their essays:

You can also check out these conclusion examples for some copy-and-paste conclusions for your own essay.

In Conclusion…

Well, I had to begin this conclusion with ‘In conclusion…’ I liked the irony in it, and I couldn’t pass up that chance.

Overall, don’t forget that concluding an essay is a way to powerfully summarize what you’ve had to say and leave the reader with a strong impression that you’ve become an authority on the topic you’re researching. 

So, whether you write it as a conclusion, summary, or any other synonym for conclusion, those other ways to say in conclusion are less important than making sure that the message in your conclusion is incredibly strong.

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 21 Montessori Homeschool Setups
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 101 Hidden Talents Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Green Flags in a Relationship
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Signs you're Burnt Out, Not Lazy

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How can I get better at critical thinking?

I’ve recently realized that when I read or watch any media (books, movies, TV shows, anything) that I usually just enjoy what I take in until I read reviews or hear critique, and then I reshape my opinion. If someone asks me if I liked the book I read, I’ll say something like “yeah! It was so well articulated and nuanced.” but if I read a detailed critique of the book, I’ll start to reshape my opinion towards that critique.

What I’m wondering is why I’m not able to think critically enough that I’m able to bring up good/valid questions, critique, opinions of these books, shows, movies on my own before hearing anyone else’s? Does this happen to anyone else? How can I practice critical thinking when I’m taking in media?

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Is there a word for someone who won't think critically? [closed]

Is there a word for someone who won't think through issues and instead comes to others hoping that they will think for them and solve problems for them? A word that is more specific to a lack of critical thinking skills than "lazy"?

• single-word-requests
• pejorative-language

• 2 on Stack Overflow and some other online forums, there is the concept of a help vampire .... –  Hellion Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 21:00
• 1 It's not clear what you're asking - are you more interested in the lack of ability to think logically, or the lack of desire to do so? I.e., stupid vs lazy? –  John Feltz Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 21:01
• The lack of desire, but I was hoping for something a little more specific to someone who refuses to think than lazy...but still something along those lines –  Heather Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 21:03
• 1 uncritical refers to being superficial and not analyzing or looking in detail at something. But it does not imply doing so out of laziness. It sounds like you are looking for being uncritical out of laziness, not out of inability to be critical. –  Drew Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 21:05
• Yes, those people are dependent. Dunno a noun for them. There are many reasons why people can't think for themselves, mostly because they are too neurotic and only believe in what the "other" says due to their own psychic and psychological dependency on others. Like every problem in life, they think other people can solve whatever their problem is instead of trying to figure it out themselves. –  Lambie Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 22:45

3 Answers 3

The person in the scenario that you have portrayed isn't necessarily lacking the ability of critical thinking and is very much as you say, lazy . But to answer the question:

According to Cambridge Dictionary: Critical Thinking means: the process of thinking carefully about a subject or idea, without allowing feelings or opinions to affect you. Which basically means objective, unbiased or disinterested in one's thinking and analysis. The opposite of it could be biased, subjective or emotional thinking . The opposite of critical thinking can also be uncritical thinking .

If by critical thinking the writer loosely means - the ability of logical analysis (even though there are clear distinctions), then the person might be illogical .

If by critical thinking the writer loosely means the quality of carefully and logically assessing claims or statements to evaluate their beliefs and position, then the opposite might be dogmatic, narrow-minded, intransigent, doctrinaire.

You could call them a lemming .

Meaning one who follows a leader unthinkingly, possibly to their own demise. So, this person does not think for themselves and instead looks to one they consider a leader to do their thinking for them (possibly to their own detriment).

Alternatively, along the same lines, you could call them a sheep , following the second definition:

a. A person regarded as timid, weak, or submissive. b. One who is easily swayed or led.

• 1 How does this describe someone who is too lazy to think through a problem and wants someone else to do it for them? Can you expand on your answer? –  BladorthinTheGrey Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 22:01
• Edited to expand upon answer. I admit lemming does not refer specifically to a lack of critical thinking skills, but it seems @Heather is asking for a word for one who chooses not to think for themselves and looks for another to do their thinking, rather than one who is unable to do their own thinking, so I believe "lemming" is applicable. –  Cameron Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 22:04
• I see where you're coming from now! I'm more used to these people being called sheep and as I've been typing this you've added that definition +1 –  BladorthinTheGrey Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 22:08

The term simple-minded comes to mind.

The Free Dictionary defines it as:

Lacking in subtlety or sophistication; artless or naive

More often than not, simple-minded individuals will lack critical thinking.

• 1 I agree with your assertion that simple-minded individuals tend to lack critical thinking but that doesn't mean that people who lack critical thinking are simple-minded. The term tends to be used as an insult, anyway, which I doubt is what the OP is looking for. –  BladorthinTheGrey Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 22:04

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged single-word-requests pejorative-language or ask your own question .

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4 Ways Your Child Will Prosper From Learning the Game of Chess

Chess is more than just a board game; it’s a powerful educational tool that can significantly enhance your child’s development. As one of the best private schools in Metairie, LA, Kehoe-France Southshore School values the holistic growth of our students. Incorporating chess into your child’s learning journey can bring numerous benefits that extend far beyond the game. Here are some keyways your child will prosper from learning chess.

1. Enhanced Problem-Solving Skills

According to EducationWeek, students who play chess experience a 78% improvement in problem-solving skills. Chess challenges students to think critically and find solutions to complex situations, a skill that is vital in both academics and everyday life.

2. Strengthened Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking is another significant benefit, with 75% of students showing marked improvement. In chess, every move counts, and children learn to plan ahead, anticipate their opponent’s moves, and adjust their strategies accordingly. This kind of thinking translates directly to success in school and beyond.

3. Improved Critical Thinking Abilities

Critical thinking is the foundation of good decision-making, and 73% of students who play chess show improvements in this area. By evaluating different possibilities and making informed choices, students develop the skills necessary to excel in a wide range of subjects.

4. Better Decision-Making

Decision-making is a crucial life skill, and 64% of students who play chess see improvements here. Chess teaches players to weigh their options and make decisions that will have long-term impacts, a valuable skill that will serve them well throughout their lives. The importance cannot be understated when it comes to decision-making benefits.

5. Increased Interest in School

Lastly, chess has been shown to boost students’ interest in school by 62%. The game’s engaging nature helps children stay motivated and eager to learn, which is essential for academic success.

At Kehoe-France Southshore School, we believe in nurturing every aspect of your child’s development. Our commitment to providing quality education, combined with enriching activities like chess, ensures that your student is prepared for a successful future. To learn more about our programs, contact us today and see why we’re the best private school in the area. We look forward to meeting you and your child soon and providing them with the best education they can get!

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2024 Election

Harris’ momentum continues as she ties with trump in these swing states.

Domenico Montanaro

HARRIS TRUMP POLLING - Montanaro

The good news keeps coming for Vice President Harris.

She has now not only made up ground in public polls in the swing states in her campaign for president, but has now actually taken narrow leads in three critical states that would put her at just enough electoral votes to win the White House, according to polling averages.

To be clear, these leads are mostly within the surveys’ margins of error, and Democratic pollsters worry that polling error could overstate Harris’ strength. Their message is one that was heard from many speakers at the Democrats’ convention last week: this is a close race, and don’t become irrationally exuberant.

NPR’s analysis now has all seven of the most closely watched swing states as toss-ups, moving all of the Sun Belt states from Lean Republican previously. NPR’s analysis in this map is not based strictly on polling, but also on historical trends and conversations with campaigns and party strategists.

Harris has momentum, but the race is still tight. Here are the paths to the presidency

In a map based strictly on the polls, Harris is now exactly at 270, the number needed to win.

For the state polling, NPR's analysis is based on an average of surveys aggregated by FiveThirtyEight and The Hill/DDHQ . If a candidate has a lead of 1 percentage point or more in an average of the two, then the state is marked as red or blue. If the margin is tighter than 1 point, then it is marked as a pure Toss-Up.

Harris has now taken a consistent, though narrow lead in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She holds an average lead of about 3 points in Wisconsin and Michigan, but only 1 point in Pennsylvania, where both campaigns are spending the most.

In the Sun Belt, former President Donald Trump holds an almost 2-point lead in Georgia, and it is within 1 point in each of the other three: North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona.

That’s about as tight as it can get and should be no solace to either campaign, as the debates approach and early voting is just weeks away.

• Kamala Harris
• election 2024
• Donald Trump

Ukraine war latest: Girl among five killed in bomb attack that hit Kharkiv playground; Putin to visit country with power to arrest him

Five people have died, including a 14-year-old girl on a playground, following a Russian guided bomb attack on Kharkiv, officials in the city say. Vladimir Putin is set to visit Mongolia - a member of the International Criminal Court which has issued an arrest warrant for him.

Friday 30 August 2024 16:37, UK

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• Girl among five killed in attack on Ukrainian city Kharkiv
• Women killed in strike on Sumy region that hit baby food packaging factory
• Putin to visit International Criminal Court member Mongolia
• Ukrainian F-16 pilot killed by friendly fire, MP claims
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• Reporting by Bhvishya Patel , and earlier by  Mark Wyatt

Ukraine has urged Mongolia to arrest Vladimir Putin on an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant when he visits next week.

The court issued an arrest warrant in March of last year against Mr Putin, accusing him of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. 

The Kremlin has dismissed the accusation, saying it is politically motivated.

The warrant obliges the court's 124 member states, including Mongolia, to arrest Mr Putin and transfer him to The Hague for trial if he sets foot on their territory. 

Now, the Ukrainian foreign ministry has called on the ICC to arrest the Russian leader when he visits Mongolia on 3 September. 

"We call on the Mongolian authorities to comply with the mandatory international arrest warrant and transfer Putin to the International Criminal Court in the Hague," the ministry said on Telegram.

Asked earlier today whether Moscow was concerned that Mongolia was a member of the ICC, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: "No, no worries about this. We have a great dialogue with our friends from Mongolia."

Asked whether there had been discussions with Mongolian authorities about the ICC warrant, Mr Peskov added: "Obviously the visit, all of the aspects of the visit have been thoroughly discussed."

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he held a meeting with the top military commanders of Ukraine this afternoon.

The president said that three key issues were discussed, starting with the situation on the frontlines.

Kursk invasion

Ukraine's top commander says Kyiv's forces have advanced up to 2km in their invasion of Russia's Kursk region.

Oleksandr Syrskyi briefed Mr Zelenskyy via video link and said Ukrainian forces took control of 5sq km of Russian territory. 

Discussions were also had over the next set of reinforcements in the area, which Mr Zelenskyy said was "extremely important for strengthening our positions".

General Syrskyi also briefed the president on the ongoing fighting near Pokrovsk, which Ukraine is trying desperately to hold in the face of advancing Russian troops.

Preparing for new academic year

The meeting also covered how Ukraine will deal with the new academic year for schoolchildren, which starts next week.

Mr Zelenskyy heard reports from Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, internal affairs minister Ihor Klymenko and education and science minister Oksen Lisovyi.

The president said discussions covered security issues, as well as the construction of bomb shelters.

Energy problems

The third key issue addressed was the current state of Ukraine's energy grid following a week of heavy Russian strikes.

Mr Zelenskyy heard analysis of energy issues, including the potential construction of protective structures around key energy infrastructure.

Images are emerging of the aftermath of today's attack on Kharkiv.

Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians, but thousands have been killed and wounded in its strikes during its invasion.

The scenes come as Volodymyr Zelenskyy renews a call on Western allies to allow long-range attacks on Russian military air bases after the attack.

The number of people killed in a Russian strike on Kharkiv has risen to five.

Meanwhile, 40 people have been injured after the Russian missile hit a residential building and playground, according to the regional governor Oleh Syniehubov.

Earlier, we reported that a 14-year-old girl was among the dead.

We have been reporting throughout the day on Russia's attack on the northeastern city of Kharkiv, which killed four people including a child. 

Another 28 people were injured after the Russian guided bomb hit a residential building and a playground.

Now, a video from the site, shared by the Ukrainian president's chief of staff Andriy Yermak, shows huge flames and heavy black smoke rising from the upper floors of the building.

Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, and the surrounding region have long been targeted by Russian attacks, including highly destructive guided bombs.

Ursula von der Leyen has accused some EU politicians of shifting the blame for Russia's war on Ukraine.

Speaking at the Globsec thinktank conference in Prague, the European Commission president did not name the politicians she was referring to.

"They blame the war not on the invader but on the invaded. Not on Putin's lust for power, but on Ukraine's thirst for freedom," she said.

"So, I want to ask them: would you ever blame the Hungarians for the Soviet invasion of 1956? Would you ever blame the Czechs for the Soviet oppression of 1968?

"The Kremlin's behaviour was evil and atrocious back then, and it is evil and atrocious today."

For context: The governments of Slovakia and Hungary have both been critical of the EU's support for Ukraine.

Both nations have opposed sending military aid to Kyiv and have strengthened their economic ties with Russia at the same time.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says today's attack on Kharkiv could have been avoided if Ukraine had permission to strike Russian military targets with Western weapons.

Four people have died so far - including a child - and at least 28 people are injured after Russia attacked the city with guided bombs this afternoon, according to Kharkiv officials (see previous post).

"The Russian attack on Kharkiv is just on people, on ordinary houses," said Mr Zelenskyy on Telegram.

"All services are involved in the rescue operation. Thank you to everyone who is helping to save lives right now.

"This strike was a Russian guided aerial bomb. A strike that would not have happened if our defence forces had the ability to destroy Russian military aircraft where they are based. 

"We need strong solutions from our partners to stop this terror. This is an absolutely fair need. And there is no rational reason to limit Ukraine in defence. 

"We need long-range capabilities. We need the implementation of agreements on air defence for Ukraine. This is saving lives."

For context: Ukraine's president has been asking permission from Kyiv's allies to use Western-donated weapons to strike military targets in Russia.

So far, governments including the US, UK, and Germany have denied the requests, fearing an escalation in the conflict.

Four people have died following a Russian guided bomb attack on the city of Kharkiv, its mayor has said.

"Occupiers killed a child right on the playground. At least three other people in the area were injured," Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram.

In the industrial district, three people were killed after a 12-storey building was hit and caught fire, he added.

Kharkiv's governor said at least 28 people were injured and added that the girl who died was 14 years old.

Ukrainian authorities have urged people living in 183 settlements in the eastern region of Sumy to evacuate their homes due to repeated Russian attacks.

Yesterday, a "double tap" strike injured three people in the town of Seredyna-Buda, before two people were killed after an overnight strike on a factory in the city of Sumy.

"I am appealing to community leaders: there is no time for procrastination today, concrete decisions must be made and people evacuated," said Sumy's governor Volodymyr Artyukh.

"There are communities that are ready to receive people, ready to provide accommodation and receive those who need help. 

"We are supported by the neighbouring regions, where housing has been prepared for those who are evacuating."

The region's military administration added it was "dangerous" to stay in the area due to Russia "continuing to intensively bombard Sumy".

The announcement added that 21,000 people had already been evacuated from the border region.

Rescue workers have been searching for survivors and putting out fires following an overnight Russian drone strike in eastern Ukraine.

Two women died and 11 people were injured by the attack, which struck a factory in Sumy that manufactures packaging for baby food, juices and household products (see 12.48 post).

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Why Tipping Is Everywhere

In the united states, many say tipping is expected in more places these days. here’s how tipping culture exploded..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

Hello. Excuse me?

My name is Sabrina. This is Claire. We’re journalists. Could we ask you a question?

You just did.

[LAUGHS]: Another one. [UPBEAT MUSIC]

What is your view of tipping?

I think it’s become excessive. Whatever they do, they got that jar and they’re wanting you to put a tip in there.

They have the iPad. And it’s like, all right, how much you want to tip? And it’s like you bought a $5 coffee. It’s like, all right, well, tip $3.

There’s a lot of pressure. You feel like you have to tip. And I feel like people are watching you at that moment.

Yeah, yeah. I feel a lot more pressure to tip more. Wages haven’t kept up, so I feel like I should be tipping more. And it’s annoying because my wages haven’t gone up either, so it’s annoying.

The other day I just bought a loaf of bread, and the tip thing came up, gave me the option of 15 percent or 20 percent. Do I really have to tip somebody to buy a loaf of bread?

I went to the self-service machine. And it was like, add a tip. And it’s like add a tip for what? I’m the one that did the work, you know what I’m saying?

You’re like, I should be tipping myself.

I actually am a tip worker. We’re literally paid less wages in order for the customers to pay us.

What do tips mean for you and your work?

It’s how I feed my family.

Yes. 100 percent.

Unless you work in the service industry, you don’t really understand how crucial tipping is.

Tips mean a lot. They are 60 percent, 50 percent of my paycheck. And my hourly is pretty low to begin with.

Whatever I get at the end of the night goes towards dinner. Or for example, I didn’t have money for sanitary pads one time. And then that tip, grabbed it.

I feel like a lot of people feel like you did nothing for me. You just put a cup on the counter and I took it. Like, why should I pay you extra for that?

What do you say to someone who says that? You didn’t do anything, you just put my food in a bag.

If you knew what my paycheck looked every week, you would think different. Or maybe not, maybe you don’t feel bad for me and you’re like, get a different job. But like, this is a job I’m good at and the job I like. And I’d like to be able to make a living off of it. That extra dollar or two really makes a difference.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise and this is “The Daily.”

Tipping, once contained to certain corners of the economy, has exploded, creating confusion and angst and now even becoming an issue in the presidential campaign. Today, economics reporter, Ben Casselman, cracks open the mystery of this new era of tipping.

It’s Thursday, August 29.

So Sabrina.

Can I ask you a personal question?

What is your philosophy on tipping?

[LAUGHS]: Exactly.

Sabrina, I think I’m a sucker. Look, I’ve always tried to be a good tipper in restaurants. It feels like part of the deal.

I worked as a waitress for many years. That was the only way I actually made money. If there’s no tip, there’s no salary. Restaurants, it’s a rule.

Absolutely. But now tipping is everywhere. You see these tip screens in places you never would have tipped before. I mean, never mind the coffee shop, you see it at the fast food place. You see it at the oil change place. I’ve heard stories of people seeing it at the self-checkout line. Who’s even getting that tip?

And every time a tip screen pops up, I always tip.

Oh, my god, Ben, so do I.

It’s totally irrational. I hate it. But there’s some part of me, and I don’t love this about myself, that is just convinced somebody is going to be sitting there judging me or I’m terrified that they’re going to. And, oh, my god, if I click No Tip, am I a bad person?

And someone behind me in line might see that.

I can’t click that No Tip button.

I am exactly the same. Every single time I’m presented with this iPad screen thingy, the tips come up. I press max, 30 percent. My husband, an economist, thinks this is ridiculous.

He says, you’re tipping 30 percent on a bottle of water someone just handed you. Don’t do that. That is crazy. But I keep doing it because I can, so I should. I don’t know, I have guilt about it.

Your husband is objectively correct. This is crazy. But tipping is not about objective cold economic logic. It’s emotional. It’s cultural.

There are norms around it. And right now, we have no idea what those norms are. And so we’re all stuck in this panicked moment of trying to decide which button you press and whether you should be expected to tip in this circumstance.

OK, so we are both suckers. We’ve established that. What we need to do now is figure out this panicked moment. I want you to explain this to me, Ben. Why has tipping exploded?

I think there are three reasons. The first of these is just technology. Several years ago, we started to see these tablet-based checkout systems everywhere. And it’s very easy to just add a tip screen onto there, that little, do you want to add a tip, 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent.

Right. And as I had less cash and then no cash in my wallet, this was always the way I paid for things.

Yeah, so it became very easy technologically to add tipping. But then the real shift came in the pandemic.

If you think back to that moment, many of us were lucky enough to be able to work from home and to be relatively safe. And we felt a lot of gratitude for the people who weren’t able to do that, who were bringing us food and delivering groceries. And so there was an explosion in tipping. And an explosion in tipping, even in places where we didn’t used to tip.

If you go and pick up takeout at a restaurant, you probably always tip your delivery driver. But if you went to the restaurant and you picked it up, you didn’t tip there. But now in the pandemic moment, they add a tip screen saying, would you like to tip? And yeah, of course, I’d like to tip. These people are risking their lives out there to make my chicken tikka masala.

Right. You basically wanted to tip the UPS guy.

Yes. And so we were tipping everybody. And so that allowed tipping to spread into these new areas. It got a beachhead in places where it didn’t used to be.

And maybe if the story ended there, it would have been this moment in time and then it all would have gone back to the way it always used to be. But that didn’t happen because we had this intense worker shortage when things started to reopen.

And how does that fit into this?

Businesses start to reopen. They need workers. They’re having a hard time finding them. Workers are reluctant to come back for all sorts of reasons. And tipping became a way of attracting workers.

Businesses were paying more, but they were also looking for other ways to get workers. And saying, we’ll add a tip screen that’ll boost your pay further. And if there’s one coffee shop where there’s a tip screen and there’s another coffee shop where there isn’t, you can be pretty sure which one you’re going to go work at.

Completely. I mean, we were talking to workers yesterday, and they were very specific about which chain stores allowed tips and which ones didn’t. And they much preferred working for the ones that allowed tips. I mean, it makes sense.

And I asked them, as a proportion of your earnings, how much are tips? Tips are a lot. Does that mean you make less in the place that doesn’t have the screen that allows it? Absolutely.

We saw workers demanding this. In fact, when some Starbucks stores were unionizing, one of the things they demand is, we want to be able to take tips on credit card payments.

Interesting, yeah.

This became a source of negotiation between businesses and their workers. And the thing is, once that happens, it’s really hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

But why? I mean, this all sprung up into our lives in the matter of a couple of years. So why can’t it go back to the way it was just as quickly?

Imagine that coffee shop worker that you were talking to yesterday, who’s now making, in many cases, 20 percent, 30 percent, even 40 percent of their earnings in tips. The business can’t just say, never mind, we’re going to get rid of the tip screen. Maybe, we’ll put out a tip jar and people can leave $1 or $2 when they want to. That’s a huge pay cut for that worker.

OK, they could instead say we’re going to get rid of tipping and we’re going to raise your pay. Instead of paying you $15 an hour and $5 in tips, we’ll give you $20 an hour. But now the business is going have to raise prices as a result.

And you, Sabrina, the coffee-drinking public are going to say, no way, I’m not going there and paying $8 for my latte or whatever the price may be. And so for the business, they can’t just get rid of the tip, because they can’t just cut off the pay and they can’t raise prices enough to raise pay accordingly.

Right. Nonstarter for the business.

Can’t work for them. And the worker is certainly not going to stick around if they try to do that.

So has there been some experimentation with this? I mean, have restaurants actually tried to go tipless?

Yeah, so we’ve seen an example of exactly this. A few years back, Danny Meyer, a big New York restaurateur, and a bunch of other restaurants as well tried getting rid of tipping completely. They said, this system is unfair, it’s unequal. We’re going to raise wages for everybody, for waiters, but also for cooks.

We’re going to raise our prices, accordingly, to pay for that. And customers will understand. They’ll understand that they’re paying the same amount at the end of the day, it just is in the form of a direct cost instead of a cost plus a tip. And it didn’t work.

For a bunch of reasons. But mostly because customers looked at the price on the menu and people didn’t want to pay it. I also think, look, we all complain about tipping. But customers also kind of like the tip. They kind of like looking generous.

You get to show off to your date or to your father-in-law. And, of course, you can, at least in theory, express your dissatisfaction by withholding a tip or by tipping less. Not you and me, we apparently don’t do that. But some people do, I hear.

The restaurant’s like, suckers, OK, great. Yeah, we don’t even have to worry about them.

Customers rebelled against the idea of not tipping. And most of those restaurants eventually went back to the old model.

Interesting. So we do have this love-hate relationship with tipping.

Yes. We hate being asked, but we like the control. And I think that is part of why all these changes feel so difficult for so many people, because it doesn’t necessarily feel like you have the control anymore.

That screen in front of you with the barista watching you, with the person in line behind watching you —

Oh, my gosh, I’m sweating already.

— you don’t feel like can press the No Tip button. Or at least suckers like you and me don’t.

Exactly. The choice is gone.

The choice is gone. Or the choice, at least, is sort of psychologically more taxing.

Right. [LAUGHS]

You feel pressured to do it.

OK, so that’s the customer experience. But with this new uptick in tipping, one question I always have is, is the worker on the other side of the screen getting this tip or will the business owner pocket it?

The worker is getting the tip with some caveats. By law, the business owner or the managers, they can’t take the tips. If you click a Tip button or you leave $1 in the tip jar or you tip in any way, if that ends up in the pockets of the business owner or the general manager or what have you, that is wage theft. It happens. We certainly hear stories about it happening, but it’s certainly not legal and it’s certainly not the norm.

That doesn’t mean that the worker, the person who hands you your latte, is the person getting your dollar. It often gets pooled across all of the workers who are working that shift or even all of the workers who work over an entire week. But it’s going to the workers.

People like us can rest assured that the workers are getting the full benefit of that tip that you’re pushing.

In many ways, what you are doing as the customer is you are subsidizing the wage. If you, you coffee shop worker, want to get $25 an hour, you don’t care whether that’s $20 in pay and $5 in tip or $25 in pay or any breakdown of that.

$25 is $25.

$25 is $25. When I leave a tip of $1, on some level, that’s $1 less that coffee shop has to pay you, the barista. Tips are helping the business pay their workers. They’re shifting. The business is shifting some of the burden for paying its workers off of its revenue onto its customers.

In other words, you and I, Ben, we are kind of helping foot the bill for these wages.

Absolutely. And from the businesses’ perspective, that’s a pretty great deal, because they basically get to charge, say, $4 for the latte and then for the customers who are willing to pay more, they’re basically charging more. Those people throw on the tip.

It’s a way of the business getting the maximum dollars that it can out of the maximum number of customers that it can attract.

But for workers, this system where they’re increasingly reliant on customer tips carries some real risks.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

We’ll be right back.

Tell me about these risks of our tipping system.

Look, tipping has always had a lot of problems associated with it. If you think in restaurants, they’re often really big pay disparities where the servers at the front of the house, who are getting tipped, often make a lot more money, especially at a nice restaurant, than the cooks and dishwashers and all of the people at the back of the house.

You hear these stories of people going to cooking school and then basically bailing on the cooking career and becoming waitresses and waiters because it’s just more money.

Yeah. And then within tipped occupations, there’s a lot of inequity here. There have been studies that have shown that a pretty young woman gets tipped better than other people, that white people often get tipped better. There are tons of problems around sexual harassment, because if your earnings are dependent on the table that you’re serving liking you, then maybe you put up with things that workers shouldn’t have to put up with.

Those are the problems that have always existed in this system. But then as tipping spreads, the risk is, first, just more workers have to deal with this, but also that more workers become more dependent on tips for their earnings.

In the short term, this has all worked out pretty well for workers. This has been a period where they’ve been in hot demand, and so their wages have been rising. And at the same time, they’ve gotten all these tips on top of that. And that’s been really great.

But it’s not clear that that’s true over the longer term. Over the long run, you could imagine that all of these businesses get to just raise wages more slowly, that tips sort of eat away at wages over time. And then if we ever see customers pull back a little bit, tip less, then all of a sudden, all of these workers could really suffer.

Basically, you’re describing a system in which the earnings are just more vulnerable, more dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Yeah. And more at risk if those strangers become a little less kind.

Yes. And this issue has become so much a part of the national conversation that it’s actually entered the presidential race. Both former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have announced policy plans to help service workers. And essentially, they’re calling for no tax on tips.

Yeah, that’s right. So President Trump announced this several weeks ago as his big new “no taxes on tips” proposal. Kamala Harris followed up and basically endorsed that proposal, again, a little while later. We don’t have a lot of details on how this would work. But essentially, it would mean that if you earn tips, those tips are exempt at least from federal income tax.

What would that mean?

Let me tell you, economists hate this idea. Left-wing economists and right-wing economists, this is one point they can kind of all agree on.

And why do they hate it?

Because they say it’s unfair. It singles out this one group of workers for special treatment. The person who works at McDonald’s who doesn’t get tipped, they don’t benefit from this. The retail worker doesn’t benefit from this. It’s just this one group of workers who get this special treatment where they don’t have to pay taxes.

Right. Right.

But there’s also maybe an even more fundamental issue, which is that if you think you hate tipping now, if these proposals go through, you’re going to see so much more tipping.

Uh-oh, I’m holding on to my hat.

Because it’s basically a subsidy for tips.

As a worker, we said before, you don’t care whether you make, $25 an hour or $20 plus $5 an hour in tips, except that if some of that money isn’t taxed, you want more of that. You want more tips.

Basically, you want your entire salary to be a tip.

Ideally, right? And so that works great for the business perspective. Great, I don’t need to pay my workers.

[LAUGHS]: Wee!

It’s all tips now. Workers happy about that. What that means is you’re going to see more businesses looking for ways to have their workers count as tipped. Maybe you start to see tips in places that we’re not seeing them at all. Maybe you really do start to pay tips at a retail outlet, at a gas station.

Grocery store?

At a grocery store, why not? And the issue there, beyond just it being annoying for you and me, is that it further ingrains this system. All those problems that we were talking about in tipping now involves even more workers across the economy. And they’re even more vulnerable to that possibility that you and I start tipping a little bit less.

Ben, how would you describe where we are in this tipping moment? Is this just the new normal?

I think we’re still in a period of transition here. The fact that we’re having this conversation on some level tells you that we’re not totally in a new normal yet. You don’t leave a restaurant and say to yourself, man, I can’t believe I was asked to tip. But we’re still all the time having this conversation about, you wouldn’t believe I got asked to tip at the self-checkout.

Right. The bakery, for god’s sake.

It’s still a transition. It’s still happening. Over time, norms will develop. We’ll figure out the places where we tip and the places where we don’t, and how much and all of that.

But the dust hasn’t quite settled yet.

It hasn’t settled. But I think what we do know is that we’re not going back. We’re now going back to a world where we only tip in those set of circumstances where we used to. And remember, this whole transition has happened during a period of relative economic strength, when people have had money to go out and spend and to tip. The question is, what happens when that’s no longer true?

Right. When there’s a recession, people are going to be nervous about their pocketbooks and probably won’t be as generous.

Whenever we get to the next recession, it will be the first one in this new era of tipping.

And there’s a whole new group of workers who are going to lose out when that happens, who are dependent on tips and will suffer when customers start pulling those tips back.

Ben, thank you.

Sabrina, thank you so much. And the screen is just going to ask you a couple of questions at the end here.

[LAUGHS]: Ben, 30 percent.

Here’s what else you should know today. On Wednesday, at least 10 Palestinians were killed when hundreds of Israeli troops launched major raids overnight in the occupied West Bank, targeting Palestinian militants, after what Israel said was months of rising attacks. The operation, the largest since 2023, followed months of escalating Israeli raids in the occupied territory, where nearly three million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule.

And the Supreme Court maintained a temporary pause on a new plan by President Biden to wipe out tens of millions of dollars of student debt. The plan was part of the president’s approach to forgiving debt after the Supreme Court rejected a more ambitious proposal last year that would have canceled more than $400 billion in loans. The scaled-down plan was directed at certain types of borrowers, including people on disability and public service workers. The court’s decision leaves millions of borrowers enrolled in the new plan in limbo.

Today’s episode was produced by Mooj Zadie, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Eric Krupke, and Clare Toeniskoetter. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Brendan Klinkenberg, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Rowan Niemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

[THEME MUSIC]

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

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Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Featuring Ben Casselman

Produced by Mooj Zadie Asthaa Chaturvedi Eric Krupke and Clare Toeniskoetter

Edited by Lisa Chow and Brendan Klinkenberg

Original music by Dan Powell Marion Lozano and Rowan Niemisto

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow ‘The Daily’ Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadio

Tipping, once contained to certain corners of the economy, has exploded, creating confusion and angst. Now, it is even becoming an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.

Ben Casselman, who covers the U.S. economy for The New York Times, cracks open the mystery of this new era of tipping.

On today’s episode

Ben Casselman , a reporter covering the U.S. economy for The New York Times.

Background reading

How to deal with the many requests for tips .

Former President Donald J. Trump called Vice President Kamala Harris a “copycat” over her “no tax on tips” plan.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman.

Ben Casselman writes about economics with a particular focus on stories involving data. He has covered the economy for nearly 20 years, and his recent work has focused on how trends in labor, politics, technology and demographics have shaped the way we live and work. More about Ben Casselman

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