Quotes from Charles Wheelan

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

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.

How much does it cost to treat leprosy? One $3 dose of antibiotic will cure a mild case; a $20 regimen of three antibiotics will cure a more severe case. The World Health Organization even provides the drugs free, but India's health care infrastructure is not good enough to identify the afflicted and get them the medicine they need. So, more than 100,000 people in India are horribly disfigured by a disease that costs $3 to cure. That is what it means to have a per capita GDP of $2,900.

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.

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

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

I once interviewed Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics and a noted baseball enthusiast. I asked if it bothered him that he received less money for winning the Nobel Prize than Roger Clemens, who was pitching for the Red Sox at the time, earned in a single season. "No," Solow said. "There are a lot of good economists, but there is only one Roger Clemens." That is how economists think.

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

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

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

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

Regression analysis is the hydrogen bomb of the statistics arsenal.

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

Here is one of the most important things to remember when doing research that involves regression analysis: Try not to kill anyone. You can even put a little Post-it note on your computer monitor: "Do not kill people with your research." Because some very smart people have inadvertently violated that rule.

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

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