People often mistake temporal association for causation in politics. One example of this, despite ample counter-evidence, is the assignment of blame or credit for complex economic responses to the sitting United States President. Economic outcomes during a presidency are often misattributed as direct presidential achievements or failures, when in actuality, these outcomes are shaped by lagged policy events, inherited conditions, international or external shock events, or other compounded factors outside the direct control of any individual, administration, or organization.
This is not to say that the Executive Branch has no effect on economic factors, and certain actions with global-spanning scope such as broad non-localized tariffs, military actions, or other supply-line altering policy choices can have noticeable and sometimes seemingly immediate economic consequences. But these events occur much less often than the consistent application of credit or blame by the media and other reporting agencies.
Some would argue against my thesis, but even those who acquiesce to the popular credit-blame mantra and claim that the President has “a substantial impact” on economic performance, admit that the traits that have real impact are not the popular stereotypes. It is in fact in the Executive’s reaction to the outlier events, similar to the above listed global-spanning exceptions, where the President has power to apply real economic pressure that produce a time-bound effect on economic mobility[2].
This pattern of misattribution is echoed by researchers on both sides of this argument. Sonnenfeld and Henriques of Yale University[3] argue that most economic responses unfold over much longer timescales than are popularly attributed. They further state that the misallocation of popular cause-and-effect narratives skew the real affect that policy decisions have on the economy, and show that misattributions are often seemingly aligned to support political rhetoric.
There is one causal inference that most researchers on all sides of this issue tend to agree with: the economy historically performs better under Democratic Presidents than under their Republican counterparts. The reasons for this trend are often contested, though the American Economic Association (AEA), an independent economic think tank that has been in service to the American people since 1885, attributes this trend, for the most part, to the Left’s tendency to pursue expansionary policies, and the Right’s tendency to disrupt international energy markets[1].
It is clear that the U.S. President has a unique ability to influence national and global economic trends, but the over-application and mis-attribution of credit and blame given to the Executive Branch over the economic climate is real. This distribution of misinformation as a reality is widely accepted among economists and researchers, but conversations around the tactic and motivations of this rampant distribution of misinformation must remain in the realm of speculation.
RReferences
- Blinder, A. S., & Watson, M. W. (2016). Presidents and the US economy: An econometric exploration. American Economic Review, 106(4), 1015–1045. doi.org/10.1257/aer.20140913 ↩
- Does the president really affect the US economy? (n.d.). Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, Georgia Tech. ↩
- Sonnenfeld, J. A. (2024, September 6). The truth beneath the economic misinformation. Yale Insights. ↩