Opinion graph

Sharon P. pointed us to this graph, which can make one speechless.

Reference: "Bulls, Bears, Donkeys, Elephants", New York Times, Oct 14 2008.

Comments

[Ken]

Worse is the misuse of statistics. Essentially good performance is being president during a bubble, bad is being there when the bubble bursts. A year ago George W Bush would have had nearly 10% pa growth, now that the bubble has burst it is negative.

The best way of creating a bubble is to keep interest rates too low, Clinton's success is presumably a result of Greenspan's policies.

[Joe D'Anna]

Check out
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/StockMarketReturnsByParty/
this fun demonstration permits a much more realistic an intelligent comparison, including dividend reinvestment, inflation and policy effect lag. Incorporating the first to and allowing for a 12 month lag in policy impact results in effectively identical performance attributable to each party *including Hoover*

I suppose I am confused now. In order to see the issue's here, one would have to have some understanding of how finance does (or does not) work. The critiques waged on that facet, I am okay with. Are there strictly presentation-related issues as in the "From Bad to Worse" post, for example? Is the only issue that this conveys a false "truth" about the domestic political economy, not that this would be trivial by itself?

[InfoEmpresa]

I find this graph very interesting, however it leaves a few observations in my mind...
1) How was this performance measured? Year 1 vs. last Year in presidency? Average from year to year?
2) Clearly Bush is the second worse from the pack... however, things are beginning to stabilize and go upward... will he be able to reach positive growth in what little time he has left?
3) Removing worst offenders, you'll see republicans outperform democrats on average...
4) The republican side is more volatile, while democrats have a more stable upwards tendency...