An optimistic president portends economic disaster.

Photo: flickr/BlatantWorld.comThe abstract for this paper starts out fairly depressing -- apparently, "Previous research has shown that positive thinking, in the form of fantasies about an idealized future, predicts low effort and poor performance." And it doesn't get much better. Here, the researchers hypothesized that positive thinking (in this case, by newspapers and presidents) might also have a negative impact on the economy. To test this, they analyzed historical documents, and did indeed find correlations: for example, "the more presidential inaugural addresses contained positive thinking about the future, the more the gross domestic product and the employment rate declined in the presidents' subsequent tenures." If only Eeyore could be president...Positive Thinking About the Future in Newspaper Reports and Presidential Addresses Predicts Economic Downturn. "Previous research has shown that positive thinking, in the form of fantasies about an idealized future, predicts low effort and poor performance. In the studies reported here, ...