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Comment by mewpmewp2 | Hacker News Reader

Which leads to the following: How do you measure if someone is a good president? What measurements do you use to claim Trump is not a good president?

Surely it can't be approval ratings since you can't expect public to understand nuances behind the decisions and what the president actually has to be doing? It can't be just GDP because GDP might have been going up anyway? It can't be what the president is saying in public and how many of those facts are wrong since this doesn't mean what actual decisions the president is making.

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Aren't there universal measurements for leaders/counties?

For example the Bible has a lot of wisdom like: 'If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.' This was already written some 2000 years ago and has been proven true over time.

So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.

> So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.

That’s a nice one. Yet do you think then Hitler might be a good leader? (not a joke). He united the white German population in a time of great economic disarray - in both Germany and Europe. Maybe we should measure unity and cooperation with other countries? Global solidarity

You have got a good point but I doubt it is true because a lot of Germans were against Hitler.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism

> He united the white German population in a time of great economic disarray

Rather, he united the country because it was in an economic disarray :)

> What measurements do you use to claim Trump is not a good president?

Number of his supporters arguing that objectively there's no such thing as a good president :-p

> Number of his supporters arguing that objectively there's no such thing as a good president :-p

That’s probably a bad metric because his supporters love him.

It’s the swing voters making those kinds of comments because they want to vote for him but he’s done some dodgy things.

Some combination of GINI, average life expectancy, number of bankruptcies, business closures, unemployment, changes in all-cause mortality, median household debt, disposable income, educational attainment, and so on.

If you look at a basket of well-being measures as opposed to raw GDP it's hard to argue that Trump has done a good job.

Of course Covid has had a big effect. But there were many policy options for handling that, and Trump - and his far-right equivalents in other countries - reliably picked some of the least effective ones.

Never met a person on the right who considered GINI index as a good measure.

Regarding bankruptcies, unemployment, household debt Etc, Obama's first term would show really low score on these things, presuming that's all he had, almost none of it was caused by the actions taken by him during his presidency.

> If you look at a basket of well-being measures as opposed to raw GDP it's hard to argue

It is too soon to argue any of those measures.

You can’t take a single moment in time in the middle of a crisis to judge.

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