Charles Wheelan Quotes

#1. So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression garbage in, garbage out.

Charles Wheelan

#2. Is the journey still worthwhile if the mountain turns out to be enshrouded in fog at the top?

Charles Wheelan

#3. Statistics is like a high-caliber weapon: helpful when used correctly and potentially disastrous in the wrong hands.

Charles Wheelan

#4. During the twentieth century, communist governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peacetime, either by repression or by famine.

Charles Wheelan

#5. what economic benefit smokers provide for nonsmokers (they die earlier, leaving more Social Security and pension benefits for the rest of us),

Charles Wheelan

#6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

Charles Wheelan

#7. The real cost of something is what you must give up in order to get it, which is almost always more than just cash.

Charles Wheelan

#8. A study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that every $1 increase in the price of gasoline is associated with an additional 1,500 motorcycle deaths annually.10

Charles Wheelan

#9. The democratic process will always favor small, well-organized groups at the expense of large, diffuse groups.

Charles Wheelan

#10. Making money takes time, so when we shop, we're really spending time. The real cost of living isn't measured in dollars and cents but in the hours and minutes we must work to live.1

Charles Wheelan

#11. Two percent who care deeply about something are a more potent political force than the 98 percent who feel the opposite but aren't motivated enough to do anything about it.

Charles Wheelan

#12. Most economists would concede that, in theory, government has the tools to smooth the business cycle. The problem is that fiscal policy is not made in theory; it's made in Congress.

Charles Wheelan

#13. Meanwhile, time is one of our most scarce resources. At the moment, you are reading instead of working, playing with the dog, applying to law school, shopping for groceries, or having sex. Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics.

Charles Wheelan

#14. The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income."4

Charles Wheelan

#15. Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we've already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem).

Charles Wheelan

#16. (As a rule of thumb, the sample size must be at least 30 for the central limit theorem to hold true.) This

Charles Wheelan

#17. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it maximized his utility.

Charles Wheelan

#18. Our ability to analyze data has grown far more sophisticated than our thinking about what we ought to do with the results. You

Charles Wheelan

#19. At a time when we can split the atom, land on the moon, and decode the human genome, why do 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day?

Charles Wheelan

#20. Technology displaces workers in the short run but does not lead to mass unemployment in the long run.

Charles Wheelan

#21. Recognize that your own motivation, ambition, and talents will determine your success more than the college name on your diploma."8

Charles Wheelan

#22. Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house.

Charles Wheelan

#23. The most dangerous kind of job stress stems from having "low control" over one's responsibilities.

Charles Wheelan

#24. It's easy to lie with statistics, but it's hard to tell the truth without them.

Charles Wheelan

#25. In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice. Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to buy books on Amazon would be formidable.

Charles Wheelan

#26. Change is inevitable; but progress depends on what we do with that change.

Charles Wheelan

#27. If you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.

Charles Wheelan

#28. Economics is like gravity: Ignore it and you will be in for some rude surprises.

Charles Wheelan

#29. The world is producing more and more data, ever faster and faster. Yet, as the New York Times has noted, "Data is merely the raw material of knowledge."3* Statistics is the most powerful tool we have for using information to some meaningful end,

Charles Wheelan

#30. A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives.

Charles Wheelan

#31. According to the American Lung Association, the average smoker dies seven years earlier than the average nonsmoker, which means that smokers pay into Social Security and private pension funds for all of their working lives but then don't stick around very long to collect the benefits.

Charles Wheelan

#32. We've built a society that values civil liberties even at the expense of social order.

Charles Wheelan

#33. Probability doesn't make mistakes; people using probability make mistakes.

Charles Wheelan

#34. Descriptive statistics exist to simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail.

Charles Wheelan

#35. Why did the entrepreneur cross the road? Because he could make more money on the other side.

Charles Wheelan