34 Quotes by Charles Wheelan

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

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.

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.

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

A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

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.