Charles Wheelan Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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