Personal Wealth of US Presidents

As a recent article by The Atlantic shows, the men who have been elected to the highest office of government have generally been wealthy. By combining The Atlantics data on presidential wealth with a 2009 CSPAN poll which ranked the presidents by their job performance, we have attempted to analyze whether wealth affects Presidential effectiveness.

Very generally, the trend line on the bottom graph shows that as wealth increases, so does the president's ranking. However, when outliers like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and JFK are removed, the correlation is significantly reduced. There are other exceptions: Abraham Lincoln tops the chart, but was essentially penniless his entire life.

Pictures: Although it would have been too complex to put pictures on the visualization itself, having thumbnails on the side achieves the same result without harming the analysis.