President’s Day

Okay, real talk. George Washington’s birthday was Feb 22nd. President’s day was originally planned to honor George Washington, so I’m sticking to that fact that this post is NOT late, and instead, the exact time it’s supposed to be posted. Afterall, a wizard is never late.

In honor of all the presidents that have came and passed, I thought I would play with some presidential data, and create a scorecard, using OpenEcon methodologies, and weighing their term lengths. Basically give them each a economic report card for their legacy in the office.

Now, many of these indicators, we started tracking mid-way through the 20th century. For example, it’s really hard to find unemployment in 1776.

Caution

Now, there are a bunch of things that the president’s don’t control. For example, they have very little over a global pandemic, or a national disaster. So this should not be seen as an end-all-be-all analysis of a president’s success in office. Likewise, there are way more components to a president’s legacy then economic success, such as happiness indicators, health progress, completed projects, and societal change.

The Curiosity Project is an apolitical organization, and this project should not be seen as an endorsement or criticism of president or party – just a fun way to celebrate President’s day!

Methodology

1. Find a table including presidents, and their terms in office.
2. Used FRED to pull in macro-economic data, and group by year, including…
   • Inflation (CPI and PCE)
   • Wealth Equality (Gini Index)
   • Employment (Unemployment and Labor Force Participation)
   • National Productivity (GDP and GDP per Capita)
3. Merge the tables, with a starting term year and ending term year with the corresponding metrics.
4. Analyze change through nominal, percentage, and annualized change (in a rudimentary control for term length).
5. Make it pretty, and publish the results independently.

Code Review

Checkout the repo here, for how it’s done.

Some of the challenges was I was an idiot and wanted to bring in population to create my own GDP per capita, instead of pulling directly from FRED. Likewise, I wasn’t sure if annualized change was a good way to structure this, so I’m sorting by percentage change for the final analysis.

Results

Inflation

I like looking at inflation using two metrics. PCE, which is how much money it takes to “make stuff”, and CPI or how much money it takes to “buy stuff”. They are usually tightly correlated, with PCE as an indicator of CPI. Basically, the more money it takes to make stuff, the more expensive that stuff usually is.

Kennedy saw the smallest change in PCE (just 2.45% increase, or a hair under .75 points) in two years. Even when adjusting for term length, he only saw an average increase of 1.22%. Trump came in 2nd with a 10.55% change in his 4 years; but comes in fifth, behind Eisenhower and Obama, when controlling for term-length.

Same story for CPI (which makes sense, and PCE is usually a closely tied indicator to PCE) because executives never take a pay cut!

Wealth Equality

Trump saw the biggest reduction in GINI, with a 4.11% reduction per year (annualized at 1.04%). Nixon came in second with a 1.39% reduction (annualized at a .28%) Everyone else was either neutral or positive, with the biggest GINI increase with Regan at a positive 7.61%

Employment

Obama saw the biggest decrease in unemployment (with a whopping 53.05% reduction), but he also started with the highest unemployment level of the 13 presidents ranked at a 9.28%). Yet his ending unemployment was still the 3rd lowest (under LBJ and Biden).

I don’t know what Eisenhower was doing, but it certainly wasn’t lowering unemployment, which more than doubled under his 8 years in office.

Now, unemployment isn’t the only metric that matters. As does Labor Force Participation, which is the percentage of the population engaged in the workforce (actively working, or looking to work.)

Regan saw the biggest increased in labor force of 4.2%, but Carter and Ford had him beat when you annualize the growth. Obama, interestingly, who led the table for unemployment, finished in last with a 3.9% reduction in labor force participation (.50% annualized).

Productivity

Now – let’s talk GDP. We’re going to use unadjusted GDP here (which doesn’t adjust for inflation) as we’ve already looked at inflation in this post. Overall, Regan saw the biggest increased in GDP (whopping 75.91% increase), but he’s mid-table when you control for term-length (7.32% annualized). Carter and Ford were both double digit annualized growth, with 11.41% and 10.45% respectably.

Similar story when you adjust per Capita – with Regan at 63.57%, but Cater had an impressive 10.21% annualized.

Review

So who did the best? Simply, it depends. What metric do you most care about? You could take this analysis (feel free to fork the code) and add a weighted average. Maybe you want to control for inflation in your GDP measure. Maybe you want to include average lifespans, or ecological measures. Totally up to you, but most importantly…

Stay Curious!

Sources

Federal Reserve Economic Data | FRED | St. Louis Fed. n.d. Retrieved November 26, 2025. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/.
U.S. Presidents. n.d. Retrieved February 17, 2026. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/georgescutelnicu/us-presidents.