Stephen J. Dubner Quotes

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

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.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.

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.

[Discussing economic trends:] You can find a study that says anything.

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!

as an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information.

The whole intention of empirical economics is to force theory down to Earth.

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the 'hard' sciences so brilliantly successful.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

I wasn't actually very naturally good at economics. My brain doesn't work very well, in terms of mathematics.

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions - and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.

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.

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.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

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

As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.

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

Sometimes the statistics themselves, the means by which we perceive the economic universe, are unreliable.