I got lots of helpful comments in my first post, so I'll try a second: I want to develop a list of criteria by which to evaluate a presidency. Coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is pretty easy, but I'd like to ask for suggestions on proxies for evaluating:
- Racial relations;
- Gender equality;
- Impact on free trade / protectionism;
- Education;
- Any other significant factor that would determine whether a president is successful.
I think it can be quite hard to do this in the context of evaluating a presidency. For example while you could look at GDP, unemployment, etc. it can be hard to determine if the president had much impact on those numbers.
Does anyone know if there have been efforts to quantify the impact of a president on the economy? I would imagine that most of the change is due to randomness/external factors.
This is another tricky one, in that we might need to wait more than 4 years to see the results for a lot of metrics.
I agree. In fact, I think coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is profoundly challenging within the US context. We know there are right tail events (inflation, unemployment, etc) that are very strong. But when they are all generally stable, or within the realm of stability, but the variation within demographics and geographies of the US is huge, the value of the metrics can start to dramatically collapse IMO.