Interesting:

• High-fat food affects memory and exercise (in rats). This NY Times article highlights a study that showed high-fat food made rats both dumber and reduced exercise capacity — in as little as 4 days.
• Exercise and low-fat diets linked to 60% lower alzheimer’s risk. Few things scare me as much as Alzheimer’s. Recent research is revolutionizing how we think about the disease.
  

  … the risk of Alzheimer’s was reduced by a third in volunteers who were physically active, while those who ate a diet rich in fruit and vegetables lowered their risk by 40 per cent. Those doing both lowered their risk by a massive 60 per cent

• Healthcare I don’t know enough to have a fully-formed opinion on healthcare, but this (long) article in the Atlantic resonated with my world view on the current state of health care and likely solutions. In particular, the author highlights the true tragedy of hospital-based infections:
  

  “roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Cool:

• A better (cheaper) educational model. The accreditation process provides an important certification step in education, but it also keeps costs artificially high. Straighter Line has developed an extremely interesting approach to introductory college education ($99 a month), that circumvents traditional accreditation requirements.
• Self-assembling robots that might conduct internal surgeries. Seriously, a patient would swallow 15 pills, and the robot would self-assemble and then conduct internal surgeries. Granted, the technology is more conceptual at this stage…
• Non-randomness in coin tosses Spun coins land tails up 80% of the time.

Useful:

• Picture Sharing for Groups. I’ve written before that group photo sharing has been an unsolved problem. I’ve been testing Picurio recently and have been quite impressed. Download zips of all uploaded photos.
• Remote support. Zoho has a great free desktop sharing utility that makes remote support of your parents much easier than just using the phone alone. It gives you 5 free support sessions a month at 2 hrs each. Super, super useful.

Hilarious:

• Guy in Phoenix evading traffic cameras by wearing a money mask. Really, I can’t make this up.

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The graphs are built in a few ways that I consider unusual: they are bucketed by president, and so appear to treat 8 year terms the same as 4 year terms, and they include data from ww2 and a few years prior which brings the outstanding relative performance of Roosevelt into the analysis (most macro econ studies look at data from 1947 or 48 onwards).

So, naturally I was naturally curious to understand the data in a bit more detail. Manley cites Brad DeLong, who in turn cites Doug Henwood, Liscio Report. I know very little about DeLong, but a bit of quick browsing on his blog showed that he is, um, heavily partisan. So, I’m naturally wary. To make matters worse, the Liscio report appears to be a subscription service and I couldn’t find the data used on his site either. Given the partisan source, and the partisan biasing, I presumed the data in general was probably rigged and stopped thinking about it.

This evening curiosity got the better of me so I decided to try and redo the analysis using stats and date ranges that are a bit more logical/traditional. I used the BEA’s GDP stats (in chained 2000 dollars), and BLS data for unemployment & productivity (only available from 1948 onwards). The quick takeaway is that the graphs are definitely directionally correct: over the last 60 years, democratic presidents (and Congresses) have done a better job with the economy.

GDP
On a macro level, democratic presidents definitely trounced republicans.

The numbers are even more pronounced when you compare what happened when democrats and republicans each controlled both branches:

Employment and Productivity
Generally speaking, GDP growth is largely driven by both growth in employment and growth in productivity. In both cases, democratic presidents performed better than their republican counterparts:

I wonder why graphs don’t feature more prominently in campaigns?

Update
I added this graph based on a comment by B Raymond wondering how long a president’s economic policies take to have an impact. Frankly, it isn’t clear that their policies are having any increased or decreased impact over time at all:

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