“I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything. So economic models -- how any model by definition isn't right. When someone just says, 'Oh, your model is wrong.' That's not much of an insight. What you want to know is, is wrong in important ways or wrong in ways that are less relevant? And you want to know what does the data really say about the model?”

— Lars Peter Hansen

Source: David Brancaccio (2013) " Nobel Prize in Economics winner Lars Peter Hansen on imperfect models http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/nobel-prize-economics-winner-lars-peter-hansen-imperfect-models" at marketplace.org.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as roughly speaking, how to do something without having t…" by Lars Peter Hansen?

Lars Peter Hansen 1

American economist 1952

Related quotes

“Modeling Principle: Models are not right or wrong; they are more or less useful.”

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 2

“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Source: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 74

“I do not mean to say that formal economic analysis is worthless, and that anybody's opinion on economic matters is as good as anyone else's. On the contrary! I am a strong believer in the importance of models, which are to our minds what spear-throwers were to stone age arms: they greatly extend the power and range of our insight. In particular, I have no sympathy for those people who criticize the unrealistic simplifications of model-builders, and imagine that they achieve greater sophistication by avoiding stating their assumptions clearly. The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. By all means express your thoughts in models, as pretty as possible (more on that below). But always remember that you may have gotten the metaphor wrong, and that someone else with a different metaphor may be seeing something that you are missing.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

" How I Work http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html", American Economist (1993)

“Many of the stories economists tell take the form of models—for whatever else they are, economic models are stories about how the world works.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Preface
Economics (4th ed., 2015)

“Keynesian economics is really just models and numbers and how things would work in a laboratory, not how things work in the real world.”

Glenn Jacobs (1967) American professional wrestler and actor

07:20–08:05.
"Glenn 'Kane' Jacobs Mental Smackdown of Tennessee Lt Governor" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bWJwJr-R68 (2013)
Context: Keynesian economics is really just models and numbers and how things would work in a laboratory, not how things work in the real world. The beauty of Austrian economics is [that] it studies how things work in the real world. Economics is not a predictive science, okay? You can't say, "If we do this, this is what's gonna happen." It is a descriptive science; in other words, it describes what's going on. Austrian economics says the economy runs itself, and all that we're trying to do is understand how the economy really works.

“All models are wrong; some models are useful.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

For instance in George E. P. Box, William Hunter and Stuart Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters, second edition, 2005, page 440. See "All models are wrong".

““Obviously, the Rraey have some way to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, where our ships are going to skip. How do they do that?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to,” I said.
“That’s exactly right. But they do anyway. So, quite obviously, our model of how skipping works is wrong. Theory gets thrown out the window when observation proves it isn’t so. The question now is what is really going on.””

John Scalzi (1969) American science fiction writer

Source: Old Man’s War (2005), Chapter 13 (p. 224)

“Models, even male models — how small they've gotten! It looks great for the clothes, but it's not what you want in real life. Why do we have to keep looking at ourselves and measuring?”

Demi Moore (1962) American actress

Demi Moore Cover Interview - Demi Moore on Fame and Family - Harper's BAZAAR August 3, 2010 http://www.harpersbazaar.com/magazine/cover/demi-moore-cover-interview-0410

“Macro rational expectations, as I have labeled the hypothesis, seems to say that expectations in an economist's model must be perfectly consistent with his model that embodies these expectations. In other words, the agents of his model must all share his views of the relevant economic mechanisms, as well as his data. Why? Because if he holds them they must believe they are God's truth and, if so, rational people can have no other views (and of course we should never ask how they would come by these views and data, that not even other specialists may have heard of yet, let alone accepted). I submit that this view is pretty absurd--I would almost say offensive! I certainly believe that I know more about economics and the economy than (almost) everybody else, and i can even prove it: If everybody shared my vies, then the economy could not be in today's troubles”

Franco Modigliani (1918–2003) Italian-American economist

though it might conceivably be in some different ones!
Conversations with Economists (1983)

“Without someone telling you what you are doing is wrong, you can't say what you are doing is right.”

Andrew Biersack (1990) American singer-songwriter

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Lars Peter Hansen 1

Related quotes

Related topics