First Chapter of Presimetrics Available for Download

Coulda posted this before the long weekend.  Grumble….

Rdan,

I’ll be honest, most of the reasonableness came from other people – our agent (David Fugate), our editor (Becky Koh), and especially my co-author.  

The neutral colors were partly a function of cost, but partly something the publisher wanted anyway.  (They hired a great graphic artist to redo all of the graphs.)

All that said, even if I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this style, I’m quite pleased with it.

D,

Age of Aquarius was one my co-author came up with.  He also really likes to use musical references.  Thus, I believe all but two of the references with any musical affiliation at all in the entire book are his.  One is in chapter one – the comment about disco being a crime against nature.  The other is a bit about Whitney Houston toward the end of the book.  

In think I detect a shift in an implication of causality from the first couple of pages to the rest of the text.  There is a pretty clear implication in the first pages that presidents cause economic performance.  That is an issue that was debated here, and while nearly all the debates of presidential economics here contained a lot of partisan nonsense, it seemed to have been agreed that imputations of direct causation were probably not supportable. 

Very quickly, though, the text begins to wander away from implying that presidents cause economic performance. 

Am I reading this wrong?  If not, who pushed the tone in the first couple of pages?  I understand it trots along better if you can use simple declarative statements, but I didn’t expect to see that.

kharris,

The first few pages are a bit more forceful than the rest of the first chapter because the first few pages are an introduction not just to the first chapter but to the book itself.  There are things we cannot prove in the first chapter – they require, shall we say, the weight of more evidence than appears in that chapter alone.  Thus, once we focus on material that is primarily of interest to chapter one but not to the book as a whole, we downshift our declarative statements to what is proven in chapter one and no more.

Now, if you make it through the book, including an appendix, the first pass of which was written after five or six passes were made at Chapter One, you find there are two arguments we make for causation, neither of which were ever made on the blog.  The first is kind of a simplistic “weight of the evidence” argument – we can show that tax cuts do not have the expected (by one side of the aisle) effect on a wide range of issues and in some cases we think we explain why.  Which means… focus on tax cuts as a solution is harmful in the same sense that prescribing rubbing sand on one’s head is harmful as a cure for cancer – it prevents the patient from doing things that are helpful.

But there is an appendix in the back that contains a rather simple (admittedly completely identified – there aren’t many observations after all) OLS model.  But dropping variables from that model doesn’t change the signs of the remaining variables.  And that simple model, I believe, is enough to prove causation.   In fact, we take it a step further…  we use that simple model to determine “earned growth in real GDP per capita” and “unearned growth in real GDP per capita.”  That is to say… the portion of real GDP per capita growth under each President that came from his policies and the portion that came from other sources (e.g., Fed policy, the policies of his predecessors).  

Its a simple model, and no doubt can be improved a lot…  but we think its a new way to look at economic growth.   And once you separate out earned from unearned growth, its hard to say there is no causation.