an excellent demonstration of that<\/a>. President Bush gave his final press conference this morning. The people at the conference showed a lot of deference to him, and let him get away with a lot. But one thing that Media Matters focused on
\ntouches on math, and it’s bad.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Discussing the economy, President Bush said that he “inherited a recession”. The AP, quoting him, goes on to qualify that by pointing out: “There have been two recessions during Bush’s time in office. The first was a relatively mild downturn that began in March 2001 and lasted eight months, ending in November 2001. Since the first one did not begin until after he took office in January 2001, it is not strictly accurate to say he “inherited” it.”<\/p>\n
Media Matters criticizes the AP, for its use of the word “strictly” in that sentence.
\nBecause, you see, since the recession did<\/em> officially start two months after Bush
\ntook office, that means that he didn’t inherit it.<\/p>\n The stupidity of this is that the business cycle moves fairly slowly. Economics at the
\nnational and\/or international scale is very much an inexact science. But still, there are
\nsome things that we can easily see by building models and analyzing trends. And one thing
\nthat’s pretty clear from that math is that by the time the growth statistics officially meet
\nthe definition of a recession, the trends that produce a recession had really been in
\nprogress for some time. A recession that started two months after a new president took office
\nisn’t a recession that can fairly be blamed on that president, unless he did something
\nextremely<\/em> drastic. (For example, if a president announced that the US would default
\non its debt, that would have an immediate impact on the economy, essentially launching us
\ninto a depression overnight.) But Bush didn’t<\/em> do anything particularly drastic in
\nthose two months. That recession was an inevitable part of the cycle.<\/p>\n It’s pretty questionable how much power a president has to influence the direction of
\nthe economy. Frankly, I’m not particularly convinced that a typical president’s policy really
\nhas any impact on the economy. The business cycle is cyclic, and booms and busts happen periodically. I don’t think that you can stop that. You can probably damp the cycle a bit,
\nto reduce the severity of recessions (at the cost of also reducing the maximum of the swing), but you can’t possibly stop it. And once a boom cycle comes to an end, you can’t stop it from dipping into recession.<\/p>\n
You’d have a hard time finding someone less inclined to defend George W. Bush than me.
\nBut dishonest manipulation of statistics is dishonest manipulation of statistics. Bush did a
\nhell of a lot of awful things; he made an astonishing number of horrible decisions; his
\nadministration probably screwed up more things than any other in my lifetime. But the 2001
\nrecession wasn’t his fault, and it requires either profound ignorance, or willful
\nmisrepresentation – that is, lying<\/em> – to lay the blame on him. I don’t think that the
\nguys at Media Matters are stupid or ignorant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And now for a short gripe from the other side of the political spectrum. Normally, I like Media Matters. I personally think that the whole “left-wing media” thing is a crock. The media has become so sensitive to the accusation of left-wing bias that they actually shy away from even dreaming of criticizing a conservative, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-economics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-bO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}