Robert J. Shiller Quotes

Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership - it's bookkeeping

Careful economic analysis does have one important benefit, which is that it can help kill ideas that are completely logically inconsistent or wildly at variance with the data. This insight covers at least 90 percent of proposed economic policies

When it comes to making decisions, I'm not what you'd call a numbers guy.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

Making decisions quickly isn't for everyone, and I've had my disasters, but overall, it works for me.

What I learned from my work as a physician is that even with the most complicated patients, the most complicated problems, you've got to look hard to find every piece of data and evidence that you can to improve your decision-making. Medicine has taught me to be very much evidence-based and data-driven in making decisions.

I have to take decisions—not back hunches.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

We need to know what are the best jobs for which we can train young people so that the jobs will be available in growing numbers, are not dead end jobs, the jobs will not be obsoleted by automation, and there are no artificial ethnic or racial barriers to employment. Your Bureau of Labor Statistics has been working on this for 8 weeks now, and you come with your staff and say that you do not have sufficient data to make this judgment. Well if there were sufficient data, we could apply it and make the decisions without you. The reason we need your expertise is that your intuition and experience should enable you to make a better guess with the insufficient information than we would make who have no experience.

Now, look, I - I like to look at evidence. I plead to that. I think evidence is important when you're making decisions that affect other people's lives.

Good policy is grounded in a robust set of facts and data.

Every day we go over data and use science and data to drive policy and decision-making.

You need the right balance between data and gut feeling.

It is clear that I am a person who believes fundamentally in facts, evidence, data, and science, which supports decision-making and allows us to function as a society based on knowledge.

If you're going to decide to run a data-driven campaign, decision-making has to follow it.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

I tell people to start implementing when they are pretty sure there aren't more important stories out there. An iteration's worth of data is worth months of speculation.

We must rely less on spreadsheets and funding formulas and more on common sense.

To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.

[Women] tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers.

Bosses and leaders everywhere should cherish the people who bring them bad news, disappointing data or hard problems.