Economic Data Quotes

Needless to say, the anointed much prefer to quote family and household statistics on income, claiming “economic stagnation,” the “disappearance of the middle class,” and miscellaneous other rhetorical catastrophes. “For all but the top 20 percent,” an op-ed column in the New York Times said, “income has stagnated.” Moreover, this alleged fact was “widely acknowledged” by “politicians, economists and sociologists.” That so many such people echoed the same refrain—without bothering to check readily available census data to the contrary—says more about them than about income. Moreover, not all such use of household or family income data can be attributed to statistical naivete.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

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.

We should see better and more direct measurements of economic well being.

When I traveled as secretary of state, I was deluged with thick briefing books full of information about the politics, economy, and culture of each destination, so those took up most of my reading time.

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

Most economies have a fair amount of tax evasion, depending on how their data systems are.

The White House is now urging Americans not to 'read too much' into last week's jobs report. In fact, they said it would be best if you didn't read it at all.

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

Of course, economic forecasts must be revised when new information arrives and are thus necessarily provisional.

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?

Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.

It's important for market participants to have a sense of how we think about the economy and the appropriate path of policy, to look at incoming data, and to form their own judgments as to whether or not changes in policy would be appropriate.

The total economy of Latin America is bigger than China.

We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.

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

At the end of 1964, wholesale prices had been relatively stable for some years.

Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.

There are a lot of spin doctors on the economic numbers, not just politicians.

Money is information, like bits.

One out of three jobs in Washington is tied to trade.

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.

A lot of our sources for income-inequality measures come from household surveys in which people report how much they earned in the last year, how much income they have, and so on. Those are not as well funded as they should be. We need to have those numbers.

Thomas Piketty assembles the facts to prove a central point about trickle-down economics: Doesn't work. Never did. He has cold, hard data showing how the rich keep getting richer and how the playing field is rigged against working families.

The public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone.