Statistics is like a high-caliber weapon: helpful when used correctly and potentially disastrous in the wrong hands.
Even the most complex financial systems can thrive or fail depending on whether people believe they will thrive or fail.
Economics is like gravity: Ignore it and you will be in for some rude surprises.
The most dangerous kind of job stress stems from having low control over one’s responsibilities.
The finest studies are like the finest of anything else: They cost big bucks.
The democratic process will always favor small, well-organized groups at the expense of large, diffuse groups.
Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things.
Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we’ve already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem).
So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression garbage in, garbage out.
Longitudinal data sets are the research equivalent of a Ferrari. Not surprisingly, we can't always have the Ferrari. The research equivalent of a Toyota is a cross-sectional data set.
If you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.
Descriptive statistics can be like online dating profiles: technically accurate and yet pretty darn misleading.
Remember, human capital embodies not only classroom training but also perseverance, honesty, creativity—virtues that lend themselves to finding work.) Some
The challenge with any before and after kind of analysis is that just because one thing follows another does not mean that there is a causal relationship between the two.
Statistical malfeasance has very little to do with bad math. Judgement an integrity turn out to be surprisingly important. A detailed knowledge of statistics does not deter wrongdoing any more than a...
North
A study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that every $1 increase in the price of gasoline is associated with an additional 1,500 motorcycle deaths annually.10
The good news is that these descriptive statistics give us a manageable and meaningful summary of the underlying phenomenon. That’s what this chapter is about. The bad news is that any simplification...
The first descriptive task is often to find some measure of the middle of a set of data, or what statisticians might describe as its central tendency. What is the typical quality experience for your p...
Technology displaces workers in the short run but does not lead to mass unemployment in the long run.