MSNBC Chuck Todd interviewed Princeton economist Alan S. Binder to his show the Daily Rundown a few weeks ago. They discussed a striking paper that he co-wrote with Princeton Economics Professor Mark W. Watson. The title of the paper is “Presidents and the Economy: A Forensic Investigation.”
The paper is a very well researched paper that analyzed the performance of the country’s economy under different presidents. The paper came to a striking conclusion. The economy does substantially better under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents. This occurs irrespective of who controls Congress.
Many already knew this. What these Princeton economists did was to quantify the results. They also attempted to play with different degrees of freedom within the dataset to find out why Democratic presidents did so much better.
t seems these professors went out of their way to avoid knocking the political boat. They have the data that show Democratic presidents’ economies outperform Republican economies by a substantial margin. They removed the probability that this success was an offshoot from a previous administration. No matter how they change the degrees of freedom on their models, Democratic presidents come out ahead. Yet, they are willing to simply ascribe the reality to “mostly good luck.”
There are intrinsic values they did not explore. How does the rest of the world and the country relate to the character of the president? How does the president’s perceived values promote a particular behavior? Those items aren’t luck. There are likely many more as the professors indicate that need to be explored.
Professors’ conclusion squares poorly with the reality of presidents’ impact on economy.
One must wonder if they simply wanted to ensure that their study would not be deemed as partisan given the corrosively partisan environment. The data on the economy is what it is. It is surprising that this paper did not receive massive publicity. Had the results of this research shown a Republican advantage on the economy, you can rest assured every news station and PAC would be covering it and advertising it ad nauseam.
Report Proves Economy Does Better Under... by ewillies
No comments:
Post a Comment