Milton Friedman Quotes
Statistics do not speak for themselves.
Friedman, Milton. A Theory of the Consumption Function. Princeton University Press, 1957.
The mathematics of modern statistical analysis are excellent, but there are many ways to end up with invalid results by making important errors in gathering the numbers which are then used to calculate the statistics. Often the sample is inadvertently or intentionally biased. Sometimes it is incomplete. Very frequently, the measures do not measure well what someone says they do measure. There are many other ways to mess up a statistical analysis, and is it those critical processes details that Gomez Hurtado tells us all to be worried about. He uses the analogy of blood sausage, which tastes delicious can be made with unsavory and unhealthy ingredients sometimes, and even when made right is a bit shocking to most people to watch the process.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
