Prosperity since 1900: Democratic Presidencies Rule!

Sam Williamson ex-Miami of Ohio & now <http://measuringWorth.com> gives us the numbers, and I reflect on them. Some presidents were really unlucky. For the others, the question, briefly, is this...

Sam Williamson ex-Miami of Ohio & now <http://measuringWorth.com> gives us the numbers, and I reflect on them. Some presidents were really unlucky. For the others, the question, briefly, is this: Why do Democratic presidencies rule—with the exception of Barack Obama’s?

My view: If the true explanation for Democratic presidencies’ ruling is multivariate, we have no chance of finding it. There is one possible candidate univariate explanation: It is that confidence that economic policy will be competent and directed toward full employment is a major key…

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Sam Williamson has revised his data piece on relative American economic performance as measured by real income growth during the different 20th and 21st century presidencies:

• Williamson, Samuel H. 2024. "The Relative Performance of the Economy under the Presidents of the United States from 1900 to 2023." MeasuringWorth. September 2024. <https://www.measuringworth.com/Presidents.php>.

The best performances came under Roosevelt, Johnson, Truman, and Kennedy/Johnson. You can argue that good Johnson performance came at the price of creating inflationary problems for his successor, and that Roosevelt should not receive any substantial credit because his terms started at the nadir of the Great Depression and ended in the forced boom of World War II. Those are points, but I have always seen them as greatly overstressed in most of the literature: