All 10 Uses
variable
in
Freakonomics
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- Using the data from the sales of those 100,000 Chicago homes, and controlling for any number of variables—location, age and quality of the house, aesthetics, whether or not the property was an investment, and so on—it turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house.†
p. 7.8variables = things that are able to change
- Correlation is nothing more than a statistical term that indicates whether two variables move together.†
p. 163.4 *
- Easy enough—as long as there are only a couple of variables.†
p. 163.6
- But with a couple of hundred variables, things get harder.†
p. 163.6
- It does so by artificially holding constant every variable except the two he wishes to focus on, and then showing how those two co-vary.†
p. 163.7variable = able to changestandard suffix: The suffix "-able" in variable means able to be. This is the same pattern you see in words like breakable, understandable, and comfortable. Note that when "-able" is placed at the end of a word that ends in "Y", the "Y" is often replaced with "I" as in enviable and deniable.
- What an economist typically has is a data set with a great many variables, none of them randomly generated, some related and others not.†
p. 163.9variables = things that are able to change
- After all, there are several ways in which two variables can be correlated.†
p. 164.9
- Moreover, black children didn't measure up even when controlling for a wide array of variables.†
p. 165.8
- To control for a variable is essentially to eliminate its influence, much as one golfer uses a handicap against another†
p. 165.9variable = able to changestandard suffix: The suffix "-able" in variable means able to be. This is the same pattern you see in words like breakable, understandable, and comfortable. Note that when "-able" is placed at the end of a word that ends in "Y", the "Y" is often replaced with "I" as in enviable and deniable.
- After controlling for just a few variables—including the income and education level of the child's parents and the mother's age at the birth of her first child—the gap between black and white children is virtually eliminated at the time the children enter school.†
p. 166.1variables = things that are able to change
Definitions:
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(1)
(variable) able to change, or something that is able to changeA variable in mathematics refers more specifically to a symbol that represents a value or a set of values.
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)