Edgar Fiedler Quotes

I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design, primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions.

I work on the boundary between economics and statistics in this field called econometrics. Part of my interest is understanding how you use statistics in productive ways to analyze dynamic economic models.

During the early 1960s, I decided to supplement research support for quantitative economic studies at Pennsylvania by selling econometric forecasts to private and public sector buyers.

On the way from Chicago, I spent the summer of 1947 in Ottawa, helping to build the first of a series of econometric models for the Canadian government.

A potentially useful property of forecasts based on cointegration is that when extended some way ahead, the forecasts of the two series will form a constant ratio, as is expected by some asymptotic economic theory.

None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I'm not saying that at all.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.

Forecasting

The companies that do well are the companies that use math.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

When I was a graduate student, estimating and interpreting distributed lags topped the agenda of macroeconomists and other applied economists.

I am an analyst; my job is to analyze.

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They are the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

Quantitative methods are no more synonymous with objectivity than qualitative methods are synonymous with subjectivity.

I'm concerned with the world economy, I'm a specialist in forecasting in that area, and I have a lot of influence in that area, naturally. How big it is, or how big it is personally, is not relevant. The fact is, I'm on the case, where other people are not, and more and more people realize, again and again, that I'm on the case!

It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet many capable economists deny that mathematics, except as a shorthand or expository device, can be applied to economic reasoning. There have even been rumors that mathematics is used in economics (and in other social sciences) either for the deliberate purpose of mystification or to confer dignity upon common places as French was once used in diplomatic communications.

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

What I tend to do is blend quantitative with the qualitative to allow me to plot the qualitative data in some way. It's a question of what quantitative data are most applicable. So I'm playing with that, merging the two.

It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

An economist is a man that can tell you...what can happen under any given condition, and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's too.

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

Modern economics is a set of formal models and equations purporting to fully determine human behaviour, at least in the economic realm. And there is no way that uncertainty can be compressed into determinate mathematical models.