Udny Yule Quotes

United Kingdom, Statistician
February 18, 1871 – June, 26, 1951.

George Udny Yule FRS usually known as Udny Yule, was a British statistician, born at Beech Hill, a house in Morham near Haddington, Scotland and died in Cambridge, England. He came from an established Scottish family composed of army officers, civil servants, scholars, and administrators. His father, Sir George Udny Yule was a brother of the noted orientalist Sir Henry Yule .

The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics.

Udny Yule
In our lust for measurement, we frequently measure that which we can rather than that which we wish to measure... and forget that there is a difference.

Udny Yule
- Wish
- Lust