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Opinion
Barry Ritholtz

The Economy of 2016 Weighs on Elections in 2018 and 2020

Voting patterns followed the contours of the lumpy and uneven recovery from the recession.
The beginning of an explanation.

The beginning of an explanation.

Photographer: Mike Theiss/National Geographic/Getty Images

One of the conundrums of the recovery from the financial crisis is how varied it is and the diverse perceptions of it by different people in different parts of the U.S.

All of this reminds me of John Godfrey Saxe’s wonderful poem, “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” In it, six blind men each touch and describe a different part of the animal. Their incomplete perspective makes it impossible to grasp the whole.