Quote of the day: On knowledge...

From Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:

Too many are the people who, having mastered econometrics and gathered lots of data, wrongly suppose themselves thereby to possess knowledge. Likewise, too many are the people who, having mastered mathematics and memorized the mechanics of lots of theoretical models, wrongly suppose themselves thereby to possess knowledge. Too rare are the people who correctly understand that, no matter how smart they are and how much they might genuinely learn about economics, econometrics, and ‘the data, neither they nor others can ever hope to come close to knowing the details of economic reality in the same way that, say, a physicist can know the details of some physical material under his or her investigation.

What we call facts (and they aren't always facts, especially in social sciences) do not constitute knowledge. That knowledge comes from thinking about those facts and what they mean, what they tell us about the world.

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