One Brain, and One Brain Only: Which is the Party of Prosperity, Again?

Normally, this is everything I read today that I found interesting, but today there's just one thing I want to show you: Presidential economics: Do parties matter?. It's a bukkake party of money shots:

• Democrats have a clear edge on GDP growth: 4.4% vs. 2.6%. Even if you start the clock with Truman in 1949 (eliminating the war boom and immediate postwar bust), the Dem advantage survives, with average growth of 4.5%. The partisan difference is widespread, too, not dependent on a few strong or weak readings.
• The comparative partisan performance on employment is similar to GDP growth. Under Democratic administration, employment has grown an average of 3.0% a year (2.9% if you start in 1949); under Republicans, 1.3%.
• With only few exceptions, Republican administrations have presided over increases in unemployment, and Democrats over declines. On average, the jobless rate has risen by 1.0 points under the GOP, and fallen by 1.9 points under Dems.
• The inflation pattern is more mixed than the growth-related numbers. On average, Democrats preside over a small increase in inflation, and Republicans over a small decrease.
• Though the picture so far is of the Republicans as the party of austerity and the Democrats as the party of stimulus, there's a surprise when it comes to changes in the federal deficit: Republicans are more liberal with the red ink than Dems. On average, a Republican in the White House has meant a shift of -1.9% of GDP in the government's budget balance (i.e., towards smaller surpluses or bigger deficits), while a Dem has meant a 1.5% improvement in the budget position (or 1.8%, if you start in 1949, thereby omitting the huge World War II deficit).
• The blue years have an edge on stock returns, with the S&P 500 rising an average of 4.7% a year in real terms (price only, excluding dividends, deflated by the CPI) under Democratic administrations, compared with 2.9% under Republicans. (Starting the clock in 1949 raises the Dem average to 6.9%.)
• Unlike the stock market, there's a clear partisan pattern to bond returns: Republicans are a lot more bond-friendly. Real total returns-price plus coupon, deflated by the CPI-averaged +4.2% a year under Republicans, vs. -2.1% under Democrats.
• Over the long sweep of history, the distribution of income in the U.S. became more equal from the early 1930s through the late 1960s, and has been growing more unequal ever since. But there are some partisan patterns to this story. On average, inequality has risen in Republican administrations, and fallen in Democratic ones.

The graphs accompanying the report are stark and immediate. Here's just one:


Paul Krugman has pointed out that it's very hard to point out any concrete policy steps taken by any administration that would cause these kinds of results. Yet ever since 1949 there's been a real and noteable difference in growth and employment patterns, one that clearly favors the Democrats over the Republicans.

Now there are strong counter-arguments: it could be that the economic trends picked the president, not the other way around. Still, it's striking to see that under Republican Administrations, the rich did well while the poor lost ground; under Democratic Administrations, both the poor and the rich did better, but for the rich the increase was not as statistically significant as it was for the poor.

Web development is game development minus two lines of code

I recently wrote a game, and found it very much like developing a Javascript-based web application. (My wife, who's a journalist with the video game industry beat, insists "it's a toy, not a game. There is a difference." I will defer.)

If you're a web developer who does a lot of Ajax, there is one kind of event in which you're often very interested. Most events describe what just happened, but advanced Ajax and DOM coding often rely more on what just stopped happening. The Image.onload() and the XHR (XMLHTTPRequest) objects' onreadystatechange handlers are interesting because they tell us when something that takes time is done, not when something has begun.

Another, related component of javascript development is setTimeout(). setTimeout is basically on(when clock reaches this point)=somefunc(). It's not worded that way, but eventually you'll wrap your mind around that basic idea. setTimeout() is just another way of shoving something into the list of events. Along with all the objects on the screen, each of which might have one or more events associated with it, there's a general object, the clock, to which you hook up events with setTimeout(). When you understand this, you'll realize the basic truth:

Everything in web application development is event-driven. Everything. The same is true of games.

(Read the rest at ElfSternberg.com)

Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes: ThinkSaber for the Mac

Thanks to an unnamed submitter (whose email bounced when I tried to thank him), ThinkSaber (available only in the subversion version for the moment) now also detects the presence of the Apple Motion Controller chip and will use that device if it’s available through PyGame.

Yes, ThinkSaber now works on Linux Macs.