the naked milibands

The Milibands are so close in policy terms that it doesn't seem unreasonable to look hard at their respective personalities. Here's one question. Which brother will be more likely to take bold risks as Labour leader? There are lots of ways to assess this: look at their past behaviour, career choices, choice of fruit. But you might also want to factor in birth order. According to the highly regarded research of evolutionary psychologist Frank Sulloway, whether a sibling is younger or older tells you a lot about the probability of them being a risk-taker versus someone of more conservative, cautious instincts. Originally in for the fight for food, and now for parental attention, siblings develop different strategies according to where they are in the birth order. Over a period of decades, Sulloway has put together a massive data-set that supports this hypothesis. It includes a huge amount of unfeasibly detailed research on thousands of historical figures (for instance, who voted which way during the French Revolution and who swung Protestant during the Reformation), which he uses to argue to that birth order (not class or technology) is the real engine of history. Here's an extract from a New Yorker piece on Sulloway of a few years ago:

In the family, firstborns identify more strongly with power and authority than their siblings do, they employ their superior size and strength to defend their special status and frequently "minimize the costs of having siblings by dominating them."In their relations with siblings, firstborns are more assertive, jealous, and defensive than laterborns. They also tend to be more self-confident, and are overrepresented among Nobel Prize winners and political leaders, including American Presidents and British prime ministers. Churchill, Washington, Ayn Rand, and Rush Limbaugh might be taken as illustrative.

As the underdogs of the family, laterborns are more inclined to identify with the downtrodden and to question the status quo-sometimes to the point of becoming revolutionaries. They are more open to experience, because this openness aids them, as latecomers to the family, in finding an unoccupied niche. Their openness tends to make them more imaginative, creative, independent, altruistic, and liberal. From their ranks have come the bold explorers, the iconoclasts, and the heretics of history. Joan of Arc, Marx, Lenin, Jefferson, Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Bill Gates typify the behavior of laterborn siblings.

This can all make it sound a bit pop but Sulloway's stuff is taken seriously by some serious people because the data is so rigorous.

Now, together with Richard Zweigenhaft, Sulloway has published a statistical analysis of risk-taking amongst baseball-playing brothers. They wanted to find out if younger brothers were more likely to "steal" bases - a particularly cheeky manoeuvre in baseball. The results showed that for more than 90 percent of sibling pairs who had played in the major leagues throughout baseball’s recorded history, the younger brother (regardless of overall talent) tried to steal more often than his older brother.

You might interpret the very fact that Ed Miliband has chosen to run in this contest as a "base-stealing" manoeuvre. You might also conclude that Miliband's banana moment - after backing down from a challenge to Gordon Brown - was evidence of his innate caution. Then the question becomes - do you think the job of opposition leader demands an instinctive risk-taker, or an instinctive conservative (small 'c', obviously)?

(h/t: Alan Schwarz/NYT)

ps I'm wondering whether that headline will generate some extra traffic.

pps I'm back.

Comments

[Z]

You'll have to explain why he has a banana, i don't get it.

[Ian Leslie]

You'll get a sense of it here http://bit.ly/bgmVMA