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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky

How about neither?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pg

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pi

As far as major economic trends, nothing seems to have even changed when Trump was elected. These graphs show % change from 1 year prior, but they're easy to modify to show raw level or whatever else. I guess he was "lucky" in the sense of being elected after the recovery was well under way but even that seems like a stretch.

Data proves me point he got the economy just a tad hotter than it ran before. We are talking fraction of percents more.

I don't see that in these data; any change is likely noise. And even if there were such a change at approximately the correct time, you can't just read causality off of a timeseries graph.

edit: If anything, the decline in unemployment slows slightly after 2016, though this jut because it's approaching the lower bound at that point.