The most immediate counterargument I can see to this is that, at least by some accounts, prominent families tended to send their children to different institutions depending on birth order. First sons serve as the inheritors, second sons become clergymen, third sons go abroad to seek their fortunes, and so on.
I mentioned before that cardinals are all highly-educated men who have somehow made their way to the top of a giant bureaucracy, which is competence of a kind. If older siblings are actually more capable of that than younger ones, that could swamp any FBOE effect and make it invisible in the data.
Yes, this is a major potential factor. Being older than your cohort tends to correlate with dominance and success, to the point where, at least in America, where you start school at a different relative age depending on when in the year you were born, there are very surprising statistically significant personality correlations with astrological signs.
I nearly flipped when I first saw a study on this, I think as it pertained to opinions on covid measures, with solid, high-N data from a government source. I spent an hour trying to figure out how it could be possible before I arranged the months chronologically instead of alphabetically and shifted them so that the cutoff for starting school was the starting point. September birthdays, who went to school as the youngest and least-developed, were most in favor, and October birthdays, who started school nearly a year older than their youngest peers and were consequently taller and more developed, were the most against.
As I recall, looking further into it, the age/dominance/confidence boost also translated into noticeably higher incomes later in life. I’d expect the same for access to positions of power. You might compare high-level clergy to governors or military officers, and see what sort of relationship exists.
The most immediate counterargument I can see to this is that, at least by some accounts, prominent families tended to send their children to different institutions depending on birth order. First sons serve as the inheritors, second sons become clergymen, third sons go abroad to seek their fortunes, and so on.
Yes, this is a major potential factor. Being older than your cohort tends to correlate with dominance and success, to the point where, at least in America, where you start school at a different relative age depending on when in the year you were born, there are very surprising statistically significant personality correlations with astrological signs.
I nearly flipped when I first saw a study on this, I think as it pertained to opinions on covid measures, with solid, high-N data from a government source. I spent an hour trying to figure out how it could be possible before I arranged the months chronologically instead of alphabetically and shifted them so that the cutoff for starting school was the starting point. September birthdays, who went to school as the youngest and least-developed, were most in favor, and October birthdays, who started school nearly a year older than their youngest peers and were consequently taller and more developed, were the most against.
As I recall, looking further into it, the age/dominance/confidence boost also translated into noticeably higher incomes later in life. I’d expect the same for access to positions of power. You might compare high-level clergy to governors or military officers, and see what sort of relationship exists.
Yes. I mention the differential son career path explanation briefly. You can see evidence of that in there.