Quantitative Methods Quotes

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.

My most difficult class at Harvard Business School would have to be finance.

Statistics is the grammar of science.

I was always a data guy, not a theorist. Theorists can maintain total purity. The data are always messy.

There's nothing really connecting the behavior of the Nile, metallurgy, and the behavior of prices except that I had the mathematical tools to explain them.

There is nothing wrong with good accounting, except that it does not necessarily lead to good science.

I have no faith in political arithmetic.

[Statistics 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.

The main thing that you learn in grad school, or should learn, is how to think like an economist. The rest is just math.

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

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.

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.

Economics in college was very poor; I was not very impressed with it. I actually wanted to study statistics. I discovered mathematical statistics as an undergraduate and was fascinated with it.

People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.

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

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.

Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.

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

In a sense, there are as many forecasting methods as there are forecasters. But I would argue that most projections are derived from two major methods: macro-econometric models and eclectic judgment.

I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.

I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as, roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything.

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

My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student.

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

I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.