Bob DeitrickCritiques

I found this book very helpful, in that it provides a lot of data to back up its arguments. I would use this book to debate with friends. Republicans have long benefited from the assumption that they are the party of fiscal responsibility and prosperity, an assumption that the authors demonstrated to be ill-founded. Overall, reading this book was an enlightening experience.

I was surprised with the results of Deitrick's and Goldfarb's delving into the connection between political parties and the economy. I had always assumed that the economy fared better under a certain political party, but if their data is correct, my assumptions were totally wrong.

I found the short bios of each president and how the economy flourished or stalled during each President's term in office both interesting and informative. I have to admit I'm a little skeptical of some of the results however, because I feel that some Presidents who did not fare well on their lists inherited some economic messes which were difficult to reverse. Also, a President is only one man and doesn't control the economy on his own. I know that they included in their PRES Rules the fact that a President needs to 'lead as a statesman, not as a partisan, but even the best intentioned man can do only so much if he has a Congress that will not work with him.

Overall though, I really liked this book. I feel that it is a good thing to review history and economic history is an especially important area that all Americans should study if they want to survive financially in an economy that is constantly changing.½

This ebook was lost on my IPad somehow. Can not retrieve. Hope to find another copy to read and review. What I had read was fun and interesting. More later

I agree with the reviewer who noted that the e-book format makes this book a difficult one to read and understand. When the graphs are such that they take up two adjacent pages, but you can only see one at a time, it renders them virtually worthless as an illustration of the material the authors are trying to convey. I could only make it through the first few chapters and did not finish the book. Therefore, I will refrain from any review of the content and leave it as a review of the format of the book as an e-book.

As I do not agree with the 99% vs. 1% class warfare argument, and as I believe that the Federal Reserve should be eliminated, I will simply refrain from giving an opinion on this book.

Deitrick and Goldfarb have studied some economic indicators over the past 80 years and have linked them to the presidents in office. Although not explicitly stated, the book does come across as having strong approval for the Deomcratic Party platform, and somewhat harsh criticism for the Republican platform. Perhaps, if the book didn't favor one party over the other, it would be much stronger. The tenets and metrics were very strongly aligned with the stereotypical desires of the middle class, and it seems obvious that some primary indicators (national debt, growth/decrease in debt, etc.) were not considered. One can only think through the given analysis to see if those data would have changed the outcome of how America has done over the past 40 years.

In all, this was a good read that challenges common assumptions. No matter which party you are aligned to, it will cause you to think critically. That, I'd assert, is a good thing for America.

I am still trying to decide what I thought of this book.

Despite the graphs, ratings system, and supporting evidence; this book reads like a political pamphlet and the authors are very upfront about whom they want you to vote for in the upcoming election.

I know that statistics can be manipulated and I want to be objective about evaluating the book but it is difficult when I agree with the authors’ outcome.

I enjoyed reading the overview of each presidency during the past 80 years but I quickly got bored with all of the bar graphs. Also, there was a bit of repetitiveness in the writing.

This was my first e-book and the experience was frustrating, I am also attempting to separate that from my rating. My nook kept hanging on the same page and I was forced to use a different format which was not as user friendly. It took longer to read then it should have because of these difficulties.

Those citizens looking to be well armed with as much economic information as possible heading into this year's Presidential election would be well advised to read Deitrick and Goldfarb's well written, engaging and informative "Bulls Bears and the Ballot Box: How the Performance of OUR Presidents Has Impacted YOUR Wallet".
What the book attempts to do, and succeeds on many levels, is to gauge for the last 80 years (1929-2008. The author's rightly point out that any data associated with President Obama would be incomplete) the "....actions and policies of each
of the nation’s chief executive officers....." using a wide variety of readily available data sources and then ranking the Presidents accordingly. Surprisingly ,in the 80 year span analyzed Democrats and Republicans have each held the Oval Office for 40 years.
After setting out the metrics used to measure the Presidents (the authors Presidential Rules for Economic Success or PRES rules) the authors then analyze each President's term in office and how they performed according to these metrics. These aforementioned rules are greatly influenced by the beliefs of FDR's Federal Reserve Chairman (the first ever Fed Chair in fact) Marriner Eccles but the authors definitely put their own contemporary spin on them .
Every President gets a chapter which delves into their policies and actions in some detail but there is also an easy to read graphic at each chapter's beginning that tells you at a glance how each President performed and of course numerous charts and graphics telling how they all compare to each other.
So how do they compare? No spoiler alert here. You'll have to read the book :) (Well I can tell you that, unsurprisingly, Herbert Hoover gets the worst of it) But the reading of this 270 page volume is definitely no Herculean feat. The book is well written well researched, focused and informative. The reader can just look at the various graphics to quickly ascertain a President's performance or get into the author's methodologies and spreadsheets that are included at the back of the book.
How is this book valuable other than for lovers of history and American Presidents in particular? Although President Obama is not analyzed, the Presiden's who believed in and took economic actions that are consistent with what he has proposed, implemented, and is proposing have. Yes, the individual situations are dynamic and fluid but this book puts the broad brush strokes in more detail and provides valuable information leading up to this year's election. A welcome addition (and hopefully the first of successive editions with the passage of time) to my library. Highly recommended.

It’s not that this book doesn’t have something important to say; it does. Unfortunately it doesn’t say it very well.
The book purports to establish and rate presidents and the performance of certain economic factors: GDP growth, unemployment rate, personal income growth, corporate profits, fairness of income distribution, and inflation. They have turned these indicators into a series of five Presidential Rules for Economic Success. They rank all of the presidents over the past 80 years (excluding Obama). Their conclusion may be a surprise to those at FOX News (Democratic presidents overall have a better record and generally rank higher than Republican), but to people who study the presidency I don’t think it will be news.
I suspect there are more robust indicators and the authors provide a simplistic and not very insightful mini-biographies of these 11 presidents. I’m not sure the authors could decide if they wanted to be a serious study or wanted to go for a broader audience. I’m not sure they succeeded at either. There are several factual errors (e.g., the GOP Congress did not appoint Ken Starr as Special Investigator – he was actually the independent counsel appointed by a federal three-judge panel). However, the authors are owners of a financial management practice and not experts on presidential power.

First off: eBooks should NOT use PDF formats. The size of the fonts are fixed, and this book, at least, was very difficult to read...nearly impossible on my iPhone.

I think this book was written as a trade book, but it read like a text book. Each chapter told you up front what was going to be revealed in that chapter, coming highlights of future chapters, and the general thesis of the book. I found that aspect wearing on my patience.

This book had many graphs (and of course, I dislike graphs, in general), but in grayscale! I certainly hope the publishers spring for some coloring for the published version! Perhaps it was my aversion to the graphs in general, but where was the key explaining them? And, again, because of the nature of a PDF file, two page spreads lost much in the translation.

All that caveating aside, it was an interesting book. As the authors repeated in most chapters, the results were surprising. Over an 80 year period, spanning the presidencies of Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush, it turns out both Republicans and Democrats held office for 40 years each.

Using Presidential Rankings of Economic Stewardship (PRES Rankings), which includes 3 economic pillars (U.S. Financial Health Pillar, Personal Wealth Pillar, and Business Prosperity Pillar), AND PRES Rules (Presidential Rules for Economic Success), the authors lead us to a "surprising outcome."

The book includes sketches of the 13 administrations covered by this 80 year period.

It's an intriguing notion: That the President has power over the economy, and that the party in power therefore can determine how well the economy will perform.

Intriguing enough that Bob Deitrick and Lew Goldfarb decided to do a study of it after the 2008 financial disaster. This even though economists for years had been looking for such things and not finding them. Undeterred, they decided to examine eighty years of results to see what they could find.

Eighty years. Sounds like a lot, right? It produces a problem, though. I hate to get all mathematical in a book review, but I have to mention that Saddest of Possible Equations, the Central Limits Theorem. Basically, the Theorem says that you need a statistically significant sample for a data-based test to mean anything. How big a sample? There is no exact answer -- but the general feeling is that you need thirty data points. And eighty years is only twenty presidential terms -- and even fewer presidents. In other words, not statistically significant.

Also, the book is very tightly targeted: It is listed as being completed in 2011, yet on p. 28 it declares, "our readers have an important vote coming up: the 2012 presidential election." In other words, it is looking directly to one single presidential contest. This even though, ironically, it does not include data on the president who was running for re-election in that contest! And I have to suspect that President Obama would have had one of the worst ratings of any president in the comparison. Sure, you can blame that on the aftermath of what came before -- but then, you could just as well blame Herbert Hoover's problems on Calvin Coolidge, or for that matter Franklin Delano Roosevelt's success on the fact that he succeeded Hoover.

In addition, it would have been nice to see a better justification for the economic measures that are at the core of the argument. I for one do not believe that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is the single most important measure of an ordinary individual's economic well-being. Which is not to say that these statistics aren't a lot of fun. It's fascinating to see, for instance, that Ronald Reagan was the president who did the most to make the rich get richer relative to the poor -- but that Bill Clinton was second! But, as a trained mathematician, I simply do not buy the statistical methods.

These are significant criticisms of the book, but fortunately they are not the only topic of the study. There is discussion of the over-leveraging of the economy, both in the 1920s and in the 2000. Most orthodox economists would agree with this assessment. Also, there are capsule biographies of each president leading into the economic discussions. Since they lead into economic discussions, they often include information not seen in other short biographies.

There are a number of other quibbles. Using roman numerals for footnote symbols is obfuscating. The style is at times a awkward and overblown -- the authors could probably have used a better editor. And a book that is based on an economic argument should spend more time on the economics and less on partisan politics. Argue the policies, not the politicians!

As a minor side note, I got this as an e-book, and in PDF form. If you get it, either get the paper copy or get it in a format that lets you read pages side by side. There are a number of tables which cross pages. They're pretty incomprehensible if you can't see both halves at once.

The result is a book which seems very passionate but a little weak on substance. This despite an enviable amount of documentation; the endnotes are copious. But they all seem to be intended to support a particular conclusion -- a conclusion based on inadequate mathematical methods.

I strongly suspect that reviews of this book will split heavily along party lines -- Democrats will endorse it, Republicans will condemn it. This is not relevant in my case. I agree with the authors on many key points -- e.g. that something needs to be done about income inequality. I also think that we need to get money out of politics, and to end the culture of sound bites; we need genuine policy discussions and an end to ideology. This is not a condemnation of the measures the authors call for, many of which I agree with. I simply do not think their method of analysis justifies the conclusions they draw from it. They are seeing in the data what they want to see there. They are not the first to do this; they will not be the last.½