More on Partisanship

This post on DailyKos is great. It features this graphic from the NYTimes:

















I don't mean "great" in the sense that the author has a good point (far from it), I mean "great" in the sense that it is an outstanding example of partisanship-induced blindness. Democrats read it and/or the original NYT piece and getjuiced from this incontrovertible proof that Democrats are better at EVERYTHING while Republicans suck right across the board. If I was to post something just like it on a Republican forum, changing the numbers to suit, I'd likely get the mirrored response. And, just for grins, if I was to post such a piece on a neutral forum, it would be subjected to CSI-level scrutiny from whichever party opposed it, and unblinking acceptance of it from whichever party benefitted.

Reasonable responses to infotainment like this might be

1) Analysis of the actual data in detail: Marc Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math blog points out the fact that they have completely ignored dividends and proceeds to call the entire NYT piece

... just bullshit - this is not a meaningful comparison. It's a hopelessly biased, fake, meaningless pile of nonsense. And I find it very hard to believe that they would have published it as a huge graphic in the op-ed section, three weeks before an important election, if it didn't confirm their beliefs.

This is much to his credit given that he self-identifies as a "very vocal liberal democrat".

2a) Analysis of the actual data in detail: Theodore Gray, cofounder of Wolfram Research (makers of Mathematica software), subjects the data to a much more sophisticated analysis. He includes such changes as the fact that a president's policies take a year to take effect, dropping Hoover from the analysis, starting in 1897 instead of 1929, dividend reinvestment, and inflation. In the end, he concludes

but one thing that becomes clear if you do is that you can get just about any result you like by playing with the start date and the assumed lag time before presidential policies start taking effect. There are simply too many factors that go into stock market performance to expect much correlation with presidential parties. (To name just one: which party was in charge of Congress at the time?)

Jeez, how can it be that so few people understand the fact that the president is not the entire government? There is simply too much emphasis by both parties on Presidential power.

2b) Analysis of the data in not so much detail: When I first looked at it, I didn't do anything nearly so sophisticated. I looked at just two things: the averages (.4% and 8.9%) and the start/end times for each.

I looked at those averages because I wondered whether they simply added the annualized percentages for each president and divided by the number of presidents (wrong), or whether they actually weighted them by the period each held office (right). The former is wrong because, for example, it weights Gerald Ford (2.4 years) the same as Reagan, and Carter the same as FDR. Unfortunately, it looks as if the NYT writer chose the former method, though the match is not exact. If you simply add the Republican numbers (11, 10.9, 10.8, 10.2, -3.9, -5.1, -30.8) and divide by 7, you get 0.44%. If, on the other hand, you weight them by time and divide by the total years (sort of right, but arguably just another wrong approach), you get 1.39%. This indicates he did it the wrong way. However, if you follow suit for the Democrats, you get 8.67% and 9.08% respectively, so he may be using an approach that is more detailed. If you are going to go to that much detail, though, shouldn't you include some of the factors noted by Mr. Gray?

I also looked at the start/stop times. It seems to me that if a bubble started during one presidency and burst during another that it would be unfair to credit the first president with the gain and the second with the loss. Yet, that is exactly what happened to Hoover and to W, the main difference being that Hoover's predecessor was a Republican (Coolidge) and W's was a Democrat (Clinton). Looking at the second chart presented here, the expansion and bursting of bubbles seems obvious. But we didn't have to guess: we should be able to remember Greenspan's warnings about irrational exuberance, right?

3) Analysis of the metadata: But the more serious problem, to me, is the implication. By using the S&P rather than GDP or median wages, the argument here by Democrats is that Democrats are better for the state-capitalist system. That's just great, isn't it? It's difficult to argue with them here. As I said previously, I find the Republican use of free market rhetoric vexing because they don't support it with actions. Simultaneously, while we're told that Democrats are the party of the Common Man, the Little Guy, Main Street not Wall Street, we can see that they implicitly accept and even promote Big Business and Wall Street.

Obama's promise of some nebulous "change" was easy to turn into a sinister joke. The post-election rhetoric has been that Obama's change is going to be the introduction of socialism. Given the bipartisan support between the Democratic Congress and Republican president for bailing out Wall Street and Detroit, I don't see The Change being a significant deviation from the course already set by Republicans and Democrats alike. You can call it "state capitalism" or "social democracy" as you prefer, but things here in the USA just aren't as different from the way they are in Europe as we would like to think (or as the Europeans and their cheerleaders would like to believe).

Frankly, I think I got it right with this:

Today, of the two, the left is largely the more conservative in the sense of being for maintaining the status quo if not returning to some perceived past, while the right is torn between creating a new idyllism and returning to the perceived old one. To some extent, the left is still the one in favor of achieving some measure of justice for both our own poor and for those abroad (though many of their favored policies would either do one at the expense of the other, or achieve neither), while the right wants to achieve justice by being left alone to enjoy their H3 Hummer, ATV, and the house whose 125% mortgage pays for it all.

I note that Coyote Blog is hitting some of the same points regarding the conservatism of the left.