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Commanders in Growth?
Charting Economic Growth Under Republican vs. Democratic Presidents
by Roger Pielke, Jr.
A new paper by Alan Blinder and Mark Watson tackles what would seem to be a straightforward question: Why is it that since World War II the US economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents? The answer, they find, is a “resounding yes,” with the US economy performing much better when a Democrat is president. One potential problem here is that the authors are shown to have generated a hypothesis based on an examination of an existing (if spurious) correlation. Beyond troublesome methodological issues, the idea that our observations of society – in this case elected presidents and economic performance – can be said to be samples which come from a distribution (much less, distributions we might characterize accurately) requires a metaphysical leap into universes of counterfactuals. What Blinder and Watson may have actually rediscovered is that we don’t know where economic growth actually comes from. Solving that riddle will require going beyond simple statistics. Read more …
