Lawrence R. Klein Quotes

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.

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.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics - they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams.

After my undergraduate, I've written a thesis that was in the government department, but largely, it turned out almost an economic type of thesis. And I was very interested in that, and I wanted to go get a Ph.D. in Economics.

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.

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

I'm an economist by training. I don't really work as an economist. I only worked briefly as an economist.

Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.

Becoming an economist was not a childhood dream of mine.

Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation.

There are many types of economic data, but the type considered by Rob Engle and myself is know as time series.

Any econometrician who wants to see practical application of his science will be highly concerned with applications to economic planning at the national level.

The Cowles Commission was the optimal environment for the type of research that I wanted to do.

In my long life, I have known some great economists, but I have never counted myself among their number nor walked in their company.

We have the best mathematical economic models in the world, and just because our models have been wrong for 14 straight quarters does not mean that they will be wrong in the 15th quarter.

The primary role of the economist is to find out the truth about the real world.

There is no such thing as quantitative economics.

We have professional economists who can defend any viewpoint with statistics and they do that everywhere in the world.

I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.

My dad is an economist who does global development research. What he practices is a kind of quantifiable empathy: trying to empathize with systems rather than people.

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

I'm not too worried about stats and stuff like that.

If done correctly, dynamic scoring will provide a more complete picture of Congress's actions. This is exactly the type of modeling the private sector uses, and advances in data collection and analysis create an opportunity for it to be employed accurately.

I've never been a stat guy.

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