Quotes from Charles Wheelan

Prices are supposed to transmit information in a market economy; inflation obscures that mechanism.

The standard error is what tells us how much dispersion we can expect in our results from sample to sample, which in this case means poll to poll.

The finest studies are like the finest of anything else: They cost big bucks.

Researchers may have some conscious or unconscious bias, either because of a strongly held prior belief or because a positive finding would be better for their career. (No one ever gets rich or famous by proving what doesn't cause cancer.)

Obviously good economics is not always good politics.

Skepticism is always a good first response.

Longitudinal data sets are the research equivalent of a Ferrari. Not surprisingly, we can't always have the Ferrari. The research equivalent of a Toyota is a cross-sectional data set.

Regression analysis enables us to go one step further and "fit a line" that best describes a linear relationship between the two variables.

Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders' risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates.

To understand the true impact of a treatment, we need to know the "counterfactual," which is what would have happened in the absence of that treatment or intervention.

Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things.

Several studies of thousands of British civil servants (the Whitehall studies) have found that workers who have little control over their jobs—meaning they have minimal say over what tasks are performed or how those tasks are carried out—have a significantly higher mortality rate than other workers in the civil service with more decision-making authority.

Statistical malfeasance has very little to do with bad math. Judgement an integrity turn out to be surprisingly important. A detailed knowledge of statistics does not deter wrongdoing any more than a detailed knowledge of the law averts criminal behavior.

Inflation of all kinds devalues everything it infects. It obscures information and so distorts behaviour.

The 2008 financial crisis only deepened Chinese skepticism that free-flowing capital and floating exchange rates work swimmingly in a modern economy.

Descriptive statistics can be like online dating profiles: technically accurate and yet pretty darn misleading.

Voters are prone to dislike regulators in any event. Just think about the nature of what those regulators are trying to do. If regulation averts a crisis—the real goal—the public never knows there would have been a crisis.

others are accepted at a highly selective school but choose to attend a less selective college or university instead.

We will just resent whatever cost and inconvenience the regulations impose, totally unaware that those precautions may have prevented a debt crisis or a real estate crash.

we have a treatment group (those students who attended highly selective colleges and universities) and a nonequivalent control group (those students who were talented enough to be accepted by such a school but opted to attend a less selective institution instead).

Students who attended more selective colleges earned roughly the same as students of seemingly similar ability who attended less selective schools.

There are no heroes for stopping a problem before it happens.

The beauty of the normal distribution - its Michael Jordan power, finesse, and elegance - comes from the fact that we know by definition exactly what proportion of the observations in a normal distribution lie within one standard deviation of the mean (68.2 percent), within two standard deviations of the mean (95.4 percent), within three standard deviations of the mean (99.7 percent), and so on.

the title of this chapter, "Recognize that your own motivation, ambition, and talents will determine your success more than the college name on your diploma.