Who Leads? Relative Age Effects on Social Capital

Matthew Jacob† Mike Bailey‡

This paper studies the causal effect of being the oldest within a school cohort on social capital. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and data from Facebook, we find that boys who are older than their classmates make 11% more friends in high school. This social advantage is associated with leadership roles, with relatively older boys 42% more likely to become class president than their relatively younger peers. Men who were relatively older during childhood have larger social networks in adulthood, and disproportionately sort into management and entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest that small age differences inpeer composition can have persistent effects on social and economic outcomes.

Personally, I was about 9 months younger than my average classmate through college and dramatically younger through MBA school. That helped me not get too bored with school.

When I applied to first grade, the nuns pointed out I was younger than the typical age they let in. But my father said I’d obviously be bored waiting around for another year and that he wouldn’t bring me back in 12 months. So the sisters gave in and let me start at a younger age than was typical at my school.

Everybody was very happy with how that turned out.

On the other hand, the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether being younger perhaps influenced me to be less personally ambitious and more get-along-go-along with the more mature kids?

If I’d started first grade at age 6 rather than age 5, I probably would have been more socially dominant.

My vague recollection is that I was class president from grades 2 through 5, when raw IQ matters, but not after that when puberty is more important.

Being an extremely reasonable guy, I quickly adjusted to my less dominant status. But what if I hadn’t needed to?

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Back in 2020, the first Trump Administration put out an executive order, “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” that made “classical” the default style for federal buildings. (Biden revoked it in February 2021.)

My suggestion at the time was that rather than demand all federal buildings look Greek or Roman, just ban styles from after 1945, the Year Zero of architecture. After all, there are lots of other great pre-1945 styles such as Art Deco and Collegiate Gothic that have long made Americans feel good. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in I Am Charlotte Simmons, conspicuous consumption in architecture to which you have rightful access makes you feel good.

But many ambitious architects hate the idea that the government won’t pay them to build giant new buildings in fashionable new styles, such as the recent fad for randomly placing windows to make the building look like a 1965 IBM punch card.

Six years later, the Trump Administration finally has some digital renderings of what they have been talking about: the GSA released mock-ups of a planned federal courthouse in Chattanooga, TN:

Granted, architects’ conception imagery usually imagine their design around sunset on June 1 with well-dressed pedestrians enjoying the 72 degree weather. Heck, there are probably a few dozen hours per year in which even the 1968 Boston City Hall isn’t a Giant Downer for everyone within eyesight of it.

HOK architects, however, also included a winter rendering,

which also looks nice. (Still, fresh snowfalls like this probably only happen a few times per year in Chattanooga. I would like to see a mandate that all renderings must include one of what the building would look like at noon on a gloomy January 31 with no snow having fallen for a week.)

Its supporters call the style Greco-Deco, for its hybrid combination of ancient structure with a flash of lavish pre-1929 stock market crash ornamentation.

It’s an evolution of the style of Chattanooga’s existing Joel Solomon federal courthouse, which was completed in 1933:

Wikipedia writes of the old building:

In 1938 the building was recognized by the American Institute of Architects as one of the 150 finest buildings constructed in the previous twenty years in the United States, and it was featured in an AIA photographic exhibit in America and Europe. …

The building is a notable example of the Art Moderne style as employed for government buildings in the 1930s. The form and details recall the classicism of earlier government architecture but take a stylized form here seen in sleek lines, a vertical emphasis, and plant, animal, and geometric decorative motifs. Several of the motifs, such as eagles and stars, evoke patriotic associations that are particularly appropriate for a federal building. The five-story building has a steel structure clad in white marble. …

The building has elegant interior features and finishes consistent with the Art Moderne style while incorporating motifs suitable for a federal building. The entrance foyers and the lobby have their original chandeliers and marble walls and inlaid marble floors in chevron and star patterns. The lobby ceiling is bordered with bands set with stars. The entry foyer ceilings take the form of shallow domes set with a stylized star pattern. The lobby contains the original postal sales windows with ornate aluminum grilles and fittings, as well as original postal counters. Dark-veined marble staircases with ornate metal railings lead to the upper stories from the entrance foyers. The Mail Carrier, a cast-aluminum sculpture by Leopold Scholz, was installed in the postal lobby in 1938….

The ceremonial courtroom is located on the third story. The courtroom lobby has marble walls and a terrazzo floor with an inlaid seal of justice. The courtroom is paneled in oak enhanced by decorative aluminum grilles. The judge’s bench is a masterpiece of cabinetry. A mural called “Allegory in Chattanooga” curves behind the judge’s bench. Installed in 1937, it was painted by Hilton Leech under the auspices of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. The mural illustrates the history of the city through the New Deal era and includes a transmission tower symbolizing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), headquartered in Chattanooga from its inception in 1935. …

Anyway, it is by all accounts a nice building, representative of one of my favorite looks — the 1930s insistence that with a Depression on, were not going to waste the taxpayer’s hard-earned money, but we’ll still build something you won’t be ashamed to show your grandkids.

But now it’s too small. Also, it wasn’t designed with modern know-how about how to keep prisoners from causing trouble while being transported into and out of courtrooms.

But, it’s a historical landmark, so it can’t be torn down. So the GSA will likely move some non-judicial federal workers into it after the new courthouse opens.

The new courthouse, in contrast, curves and has more expensive Art Deco windows. The message I draw from the two designs is: We appreciate our pre-1945 architectural tradition, and now we can afford some flourishes that weren’t appropriate in 1933 at the bottom of the Depression.

So, the new Greco-Deco design appears to be a good start, which is outraging …

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OK, Team USA just crushed Paraguay 4 to 1.

I doubt if this 40-year-old essay by Henry Kissinger is all that relevant anymore — World Cup teams aren’t very representative of ethnic heritages these days — but it was astonishing in 1986 when the 10th paragraph turns into a disquisition on how West German soccer strategy has the strengths and weaknesses of the Schlieffen Plan of 1906:

World Cup According to Character

The Los Angeles Times

Sunday, June 29, 1986

by: Henry Kissinger

My cousin Kathy gave me a copy of Kissinger’s 1982 second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, about his service as secretary of state in the difficult years of 1973-1974. Each chapter ended with a page of Kissinger’s reflections for the benefit of his adoptive countrymen on the long-term national character of each country he’d dealt with: here’s what the Chinese are like, here are what you can expect the French to be like, this is what the Saudis are like, the Israelis can be expected to do X and Y, and so forth.

Not surprisingly, Kissinger applied the same framework to the 1986 World Cup:

I have been an avid soccer fan ever since my youth in Fuerth, a soccer-mad city of southern Germany, which for some inexplicable reason won three championships in a three-year period. My father despaired of a son who preferred to stand for two hours (there were very few seats) watching a soccer game rather than sit in the comfort at the opera or be protected from the elements in a museum.

Soccer evokes extraordinary passions, especially during the quadrennial World Cup competition ending today in Mexico City. It has been estimated that the Brazilian gross national product suffers a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for every day Brazil plays, as rabid fans sit before television sets or radios. Statistics in other soccer citadels must be comparable.

Soccer lends itself to a competition of national teams because it requires an extraordinary combination of individual skill, teamwork and strategic sense. Since there are 11 players on each side engaged in continuous action, every game produces tactical necessities to be solved by improvisation on the playing field.

This was true even in my youth when soccer was much less complex and much more oriented to the offense. Then there were five forwards, three midfield players, two fullbacks and a goalie. The offense being numerically superior to the defense, goals were much more frequent then. By the late 1930s, managers sought to overcome this advantage by assigning the center half to shadow the opposing center forward. The creation of three de facto fullbacks constricted the attack which since time immemorial had been built around the center forward.

In the early 1950s, the Hungarians showed how to overwhelm this defense, turning their center forward into a decoy. He would move to the sidelines or toward midfield, drawing the shadowing defensive player out of position, creating an empty space in front of the goal.

But as in military strategy every offensive maneuver in soccer evokes a compensating defensive move. The answer to the roving center forward was a zone defense; defensive players were required to cover a certain area regardless of which player was attacking. Total soccer was invented soon thereafter; all players had to be able to defend as well as attack and to shift from one mode to another with extreme rapidity.

The modern style of soccer in fact emphasizes defense — with few exceptions like Brazil, Argentina and France. The basic alignment has become four defensive and four midfield players; the forwards have shrunk to two. Massed defenses can in general be overcome only by rapid thrusts involving very accurate passing. The result is a very tactical game, its complexity becoming a fascinating reflection of national attitudes.

The styles of leading soccer powers like West Germany, Brazil, Italy and England illustrate this point.

West Germany, a finalist today, is, with Italy and Brazil, the most successful team of the modern era. West German soccer entered the postwar era with no particular legacy. Postwar Germany’s newly professional soccer being as novel as the frontiers of the state it represents, it could adopt total soccer with a vengeance. The German national team plays the way its general staff prepared for the war; games are meticulously planned, each player skilled in both attack and defense. Intricate pass patterns evolve, starting right in front of the German goal. Anything achievable by human foresight, careful preparation and hard work is accounted for.

And there have been great successes. Of the last six prior World Cups, Germany has won two, was second twice, third once and out of the running only in 1978. At the same time, the German national team suffers from the same disability as the famous Schlieffen plan for German strategy in World War I.

The Schlieffen plan was to conquer more modern France first, even at the cost of slow-moving Russia conquering much of Eastern Prussia, and then turn around and wipe out Russia later. Reputedly, the great strategist’s last word on his deathbed in 1913 were: “Remember: keep the right wing very strong.”

Kissinger continues:

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From New York magazine:

The Mirage of the Gifted Child

Critics say the process we use to identify bright kids is flawed and insular. But what if giftedness itself is a lie?

New Yorkers are awfully smart, so it’s hardly surprising that they try to get their kids into gifted programs.

Granted, a lot of white New Yorkers assume they should pay for their kids to enroll in private schools.

Granted, anti-public schoolism is especially true of Asians, who tend to believe that, even though they just recently arrived in the USA, they deserve to not pay taxes. In contrast, white parents tend to assume that they must pay gigantic amounts of private school tuitions because whaddaya whaddaya gonna do? Expect taxpayers to chip in for your kid?

Being “gifted” — and by that I mean smart — has been woven into my sense of self for so long that it has become one of the surest things I know about myself. I was reading at age 4. And though I hated math by kindergarten, I excelled in art, reading, and writing, and every teacher loved me.

Maybe authors who hated math by kindergarten shouldn’t discourse on statistics?

… For nearly a century all across America, shrewd parents have known that the best first step in a child’s academic life is to get them into a gifted program, like the one I attended, where they can have an academic experience that is stimulating and confidence-boosting, that sets them apart from the pack.

Well, yeah, the point is to get then in with other smart kids.

They understand that a Gifted and Talented, or G&T, program in elementary school broadens a child’s intellectual horizons, which then places them on a course toward honors classes in middle school and AP classes in high school. All of this culminates, finally, in the strategic launch of the child toward “a very good college,” maybe even one in the Ivy League. The first plotted point on the ascent is vital — it’s what makes the rest possible.

Many of these shrewd parents also know that in many parts of the U.S., G&T has a race problem. As of 2022, roughly 60 percent of American students enrolled in a gifted program are white, though recent data shows that white children are only around 40 percent of the total public-school population — a disparity that has been in place for as long as G&T has existed. The gap is apparent in New York. bvi

Obviously, high IQ blacks tend to go to celebrity-rich private schools like Dalton rather than to high IQ Asian schools like public Stuyvesant.

Recent figures on the city’s kindergarten G&T enrollment indicate that white and Asian students are vastly overrepresented relative to their proportion of the city’s student body. The Anderson School, a citywide K–8 gifted institution, barely cracks double digits for Latino students and admits even fewer Black students; the stats for another K–8 citywide gifted school, NEST+M, are no better. The trend continues in high school. Of the 781 students accepted to the highly competitive Stuyvesant High School last year, eight were Black.

Well, duh…

Why would you use your racial privilege to send your kids for free to Stuyvesant rather than to Dalton?

Among the city’s other eight specialized high schools, 3 percent of offers went to Black students while 6.9 percent went to Latino students. Combined, Black and Latino students make up roughly two-thirds of the city’s public-school population.

“These disparities have helped to make G&T a perennial subject of debate, particularly in New York City, where it has bedeviled mayors for years. At the moment, the city’s families with school-age children are waiting to learn how Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to reshape (or extinguish) G&T, an issue he touched on during his campaign. While he has made plain his distaste for pre-kindergarten G&T testing and feels the third-grade entry point is more logical (Mamdani himself is the product of a specialized public high school, the Bronx High School of Science), thus far no action has been taken.

Third grade is obviously more reliable of an IQ test than four years earlier.

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Unless you are an Arctic explorer, a laundry detergent chemist, or an interior decorator, the term “whiteness” is almost solely used as a racist slur against whites. Anti-white intellectuals use the term “whiteness” as a euphemism for “we hate you for being white” because they realize that’s so on the nose that even white people will eventually realize that they are subject to racist hate.

If, like me, you dislike racism, you ought to be concerned that this hate word is used in American books an order of magnitude more often in 2022 than before the dawning of political correctness in the early 1990s.

For example, here are the top six hits Google shows me from News outlets for “whiteness:”

On the other hand, from The Atlantic:

The White Identitarians Are Having a Moment

Now that DEI and anti-racism are in retreat, they’re moving on to a more ambitious goal.

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is also a visiting professor of humanities at Bard College and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.

June 8, 2026

“What is white identity?”

In February, the Democratic Senator Chris Murphy posed that question to Jeremy Carl, the Trump administration’s nominee for a top State Department job. It should have been a softball.

Carl has built his career on the claim that white identity is under threat. In his 2024 book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart,

Here’s my review in Taki’s Magazine: “It’s Not Okay to Be White.”

Carl warns that “white Americans increasingly are second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded.” A 53-year-old senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, he argues that anti-whiteness pervades the American mainstream and particularly elite institutions, which routinely pass over qualified white candidates in pursuit of diversity.

Yet during his confirmation hearing, Carl couldn’t give Murphy a coherent definition of the identity he seeks to protect.

Uh … the identity Carl seeks to protect are the people who are being discriminated against because they check the “white” and the “non-Hispanic” boxes on HR forms and the like.

Is this question really all that complicated?

We’ve had 57 years of affirmative action going back to 1969.

Sure, Senator Elizabeth Warren and some other women academics got a diversity thumb on the scale via dubious claims to be American Indian or Hispanic, but virtually no white men have by pretending to be black.

It’s one of the most clear-cut things in public affairs.

“You have made several statements about your worry regarding the erasure of white culture in America,” Murphy said. “Tell me the white values that you believe are being erased.” …

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While Americans are constantly coming up with suggestions for rule changes to make soccer more exciting to us on TV, most of our suggestions would work to benefit explosive West Africans at the expense of whites with better endurance.

The soccer world has largely declined these American suggestions, although of course they can’t come out and explain what’s wrong with the Yanks’ ideas. They definitely can’t say that their fans seem to like having a sport where the biggest stars, such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, have tended in recent decades to be white men of Southern European ancestry.

But in this century, the top stars have been getting more sub-Saharan, although not from sub-Saharan countries.

Below are pictures of Fox Sports top 100 soccer players from:

Top 100 Players In The 2026 FIFA World Cup, Ranked

Updated Jun. 8, 2026 4:29 p.m. ET

Only 3 of the top 100 are representing sub-Saharan countries in the World Cup.

Is Fox Sports the world’s best at ranking soccer players?

Probably not, but for reasons I’ve explained frequently over the years, it doesn’t much matter if rankings are kind of sloppy as long as they aren’t specifically intended to address the kind of questions I’m interested in. And while lots of people are interested in my interests, they are considered too uncouth to explore in the MSM.

Reading from left to right, #5 Michael Olise has a black father and a white-looking mother who is described as “Franco-Algerian” (which I am told means born in France of Muslim Algerian descent — Christians and Jews can’t qualify), #4 Dembele is black, Kane is white, #2 Mbappe is black & North African, and #1 Yamal is black & North African.

Thus, three of the top five soccer players in the world (if you trust Fox Sports) are a combination of sub-Saharan African and North African. There’s a new stereotype for you!

White, white, North African, black, white

Black, white, white, white, white

Black, white, black & white, white, white

Black, black, pardo, white, black

Black, white, white/black/East Asian, black, white (largely)

For some reason, the photo of #31-35 is missing. The players are:

31. Bernardo Silva | Midfielder | Portugal: white

32. Jamal Musiala | Midfielder | Germany: black & white

33. Cole Palmer | Midfielder | England: white

34. Luka Modrić | Midfielder | Croatia: white

35. Nuno Mendes | Defender | Portugal: black

White, black, white & black, white, black

White & Southeast Asian (Indonesian), white, black, black, white & North African

White, white, white, white (mostly) & black, white

White, white, black, white, black

White, North African, black, white, black

White, white, black, white, black & white

Black, black, black, Black & Lebanese, black & white

White, white & black, black and white, white, black

Black, white, white, white, white

White, black, black, black & white, East Asian

Mestizo, white (Turkish), black, white, black & white

White, East Asian, black, white, white (and probably some black)

Black, black, East Asian, black, white (maybe mestizo)

What do they add up to?

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For instance, I recall reading in Boys’ Life in the 1960s that all the Mercury and Gemini astronauts, who were rigorously selected by every conceivable test that scientists had ever dreamt of subjecting healthy young men to,

were either first born sons or only children. (That wasn’t exactly true, but it was pretty close.) And they performed well under pressure:

Here’s the New York Times article that Boys’ Life was probably channeling:

EACH ASTRONAUT IS AN ONLY CHILD; Fact Cited as Evidence of Theory on Achievement

By Richard D. Lyons, special to the New York Times

Dec. 24, 1968

HOUSTON, Dec. 23—In addition to being the world’s fastest and farthest travelers, the three Apollo 8 astronauts share another common bond—each is an only child.

This familiar quirk exhibited by Col. Frank Borman, Capt. James A. Lovell Jr. and Maj. William A. Anders also is a mark of most of the other astronauts. Nearly every man selected for astronaut training here at the Manned Spacecraft Center is either the only child in his family or, in cases in which there are siblings, is the eldest son.

Psychologists who have made studies of birth order have deduced that parents lavish more attention and assign more responsibility to only children or eldest sons. The scientists have pointed out that eldest sons are treated better, disciplined more and trained better by their parents. The result, according to the psychological theories, is that they are better achievers in life because they are more completely prepared to meet its challenges and climb the ladder of success. Parents also expect more of them so that they tend to be competitive and successful in their careers.

This pattern has certainly been true in the space program. The men selected for astronaut training are chosen for qualities of maturity, leadership, intelligence, competitiveness and level of achievement in their military or scientific careers. In fact, 21 of the 23 astronauts who have been launched into space missions are either only children or eldest sons.

Even the two astronauts who are not eldest sons are exceptions that appear to prove the rule that such sons are more successful. Lieut. Col. Donn F. Eisele. the command module pilot of the Apollo 7 mission, did have an elder brother. But he died in infancy and Colonel Eisele was raised as an eldest son.

The other exception is Lieut. Col. Michael Collins, who performed a space walk during the Gemini 10 flight in 1966 and who today was the capsule communicator with the Apollo 8 astronauts during their television transmission of the pictures of the earth from space. “The psychologists have discussed the eldest-son theory around here and they have been interested in me because I apparently don’t fit the pattern,” Colonel Collins said in an interview. “But when they found out that my elder brother is 13 years older than I am, the psychologists said this was the case of the exception proving the rule.

“They said that if the difference in age between older and younger brothers is large the parents often repeat their eldest-son treatment of the new baby because the eldest son is almost grown and about to leave the sphere of parental influence.”

Until the 20th Century, when childhood and maternal mortality plummeted, it was often hard to categorize people as first-borns or whatever.

For example, consider Hitler. His father, who married three times, had no children by his first wife, and two by his second, who were The Hitler’s older half-siblings. Adolf was the fourth of his father’s six children by his third wife. But his three older full-siblings died in infancy or early childhood, as did one of his younger siblings.

So was Hitler a first-born, a third-born, a fourth-born, or a sixth-born?

You could rationalize each categorization depending upon your theory of the mechanics of birth order. For example, if you are focusing on biological changes experienced by his mother with either each pregnancy or with each male pregnancy (as in Ray Blanchard’s research pointing to younger brothers being slightly more likely to be gay), he’s either his mother’s third son or fourth child. (There could also be biologically significant miscarriages unrecorded by history.)

Socially, he was his mother’s oldest child for most of his life, but she also had two step-children she cared for, who were her husband’s children, Alois Jr. and Angela. They were 7 and 6 years older than Adolf and grew up in the same household with him.

In other words, Hitler’s early years were complicated, but then so were a lot of people’s back then.

Well, enough about Hitler, not my favorite guy.

So, you can see why old-time Europeans didn’t have as many theories about birth order as we do: too complicated.

Instead, they had sayings based on the day of the week you were born — e.g., “Wednesday’s child is full of woe”. Even more than astrology, the influence of weekdays seems implausible, but at least you could categorize everybody fairly easily that way. James C. Scott famously pointed out that we shouldn’t overlook the importance of “legibility.”

I used to review heavyweight social science books for National Review:

All in the Family

by Steve Sailer

Published in National Review, 12/9/96, 1,050 words

Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, by Frank J. Sulloway

New York: Pantheon Books, 1996, 653 pp., $30

Born to Rebel arrives on a crest of imposing hype, with serious scholars comparing its importance to that of the works of Charles Darwin. For 26 years, this statistically inclined MIT historian has labored to uncover why it was Darwin who originated the theory of natural selection. After building a database of 6,566 scientists and other historic figures from the 16th through the early 20th Centuries, the answer’s now obvious to him: Darwin was the 4th child born in his family. To Dr. Sulloway, much of history is literally sibling rivalry writ large, an eternal struggle between conservative, authoritarian, and closed-minded “firstborns” and liberal, rebellious, altruistic, and open-minded “laterborns.” (Pop quiz: Name Sulloway’s birth rank and politics.)

Despite the author’s tendency to torture his examples to fit his comically obvious prejudice that firstborn = conservative = bad (one of his illustrations of a firstborn with a “conservative ideology” is the Unabomber), there is almost certainly some truth in his general idea. Sulloway’s findings agree fairly well with popular stereotypes, the urban folk wisdom of our time. One of his accomplishments is to solidly ground his logic in Neo-Darwinian sociobiology rather than academically popular literary movements like Freudianism: sibling rivalry is genetically motivated competition for scarce parental resources. Older, bigger children defend their privileges, while younger kids try to subvert the status quo. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. (The “only child,” by the way, appear to be too variable to generalize about.)'

The British seemed to do pretty well with a system of primogeniture in which the oldest aristocratic son would inherit the estate and country house and go into Parliament, while younger brothers had to more or less figure out their own paths in the world. Thomas Jefferson helped get rid of primogeniture in America, but it’s surprisingly non-obvious that the more flexible Jeffersonian system worked better overall.

After 1776, the British Empire had a good run under the leadership of disproportionately first-born sons.

A careful reading reveals, however, that Dr. Sulloway does not actually explain the cause of Darwin’s creativity. It turns out that laterborn scientists are not significantly more innovative. (Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein were all firstborns. Genius remains largely inexplicable.) Instead, laterborn scientists are merely more receptive to other’s innovatory theories, especially when there isn’t much evidence one way or another. Once solid data becomes available, this gap rapidly closes. (Firstborns, in turn, seem to deserve some credit for resisting new but bad ideas like phrenology, the once-popular pseudo-science of predicting personality from skull bumps, which laterborns were nine times more likely to favor.)

Birth order, it appears, primarily influences opinions, not accomplishments. Keep in mind that those of us who get our opinions published tend to vastly overrate the historic importance of published opinions.

Despite heroic research efforts, lucid prose style, and admirable zeal for statistically testing hypotheses, at times Sulloway can sound like Matt Groening’s Seventh Type of College Professor: The-Single-Theory-to-Explain-Everything-Maniac. (”The nation that controls magnesium controls the universe!!!”)

Yet, family dynamics are a curiously impotent Single Theory. No nation can use birth order to control the universe because no nation can control birth order. The great engines of history remain cultural differences propagated through families, not differences between individuals spontaneously generated over and over again within families. For example, in one of his few attempts to explain distinctions between countries, Sulloway cites France’s low birth rate and consequent high proportion of firstborns to explain why so many French scientists stubbornly resisted Darwin. Yet, since France’s low birthrate continued into the 20th Century, by this logic France’s surplus of firstborns should also have made French soldiers loyal conformists, while fast-growing Germany would be saddled with an undisciplined army of too many “born to rebel” laterborns. The events of May, 1940, however, would seem to cast doubt on this reasoning.

When Sulloway leaves the relatively firm ground of scientific history for the swamp of politics, his analysis becomes a bit of a mess, partly because politics itself is messy. Unlike scientific revolutions, most political revolutions -- whether the American revolution, England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, Japan’s Meiji Restoration, the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Mussolini’s putsch or Hitler’s takeover -- contain both radical and conservative elements.

Eventually, somebody may make sense of the relations between birth order and politics, but they’ll need a far more sophisticated understanding of politics than Sulloway brings to the job. His first weakness is that he assumes that “conservative,” “liberal,” and “radical” means roughly the same thing in all places and all times. For example, his description of Darwin’s politics -- “Darwin was ahead of his time, and his worldview was that of a twentieth-century liberal” -- is a much more accurate portrayal of Sulloway’s own ideology. True, Darwin was a “liberal”, but a nineteenth-century free market liberal, infinitely closer in outlook to Milton Friedman than Hillary Clinton. Darwin was linked to the rising tide of survival-of-the-fittest capitalism by blood and marriage (both his mother and wife were Wedgwoods, members of the factory-owning family that developed the first brand name in history); by heavy stock market investments; and by intellectual heritage (the single most important influence on Darwin was economist Thomas Malthus, a follower of Adam Smith). In spirit, Darwinism was Whig free market economics applied to biology.

Further, Sulloway seems not to realize that it’s much harder to define what’s the orthodoxy to rebel against today than in, say, 1517 (the first year in his database), when the Catholic Church unquestionably defined the intellectual Establishment. He tends to assume scientific progress remains upsetting to conservatives. Yet, beginning in the 1920’s with the discovery that subatomic reality is indeterminate (which flummoxed atheistic determinists), many recent scientific revolutions have proved deeply gratifying to the prejudices of sophisticated conservatives. For example, the now-validated Big Bang theory was long pooh-poohed by the scientific establishment out of anti-religious bias: the Big Bang is disturbingly close to Genesis (”Let there be light”) and Thomas Aquinas’ Prime Mover proof for the existence of God.

Most notably, the sociobiologists’ ongoing “rediscovery of human nature” validates conservative distrust of the dominant liberal dogma that all differences between humans are the product of social conditioning. Today, the Pope appears more enthusiastic about Darwinism than the self-proclaimed “cultural radicals” who control who gets tenure in university humanities departments.

Paradoxically, by offering even more evidence that human nature is fixed and that the power of state-mandated social reform to advance harmony and happiness is highly limited, Sulloway ends up offering additional reassurance to conservatives in their rebellion against liberal othodoxy.

# # #

Steve Sailer (steveslr@aol.com) is a manager, writer, and only child.

Well, it now looks like we are finally making some progress on figuring out another reason why first borns and only children tend to be better at being Jim Lovell-types:

In contrast to astronauts, movie stars tend to be later-born kids, especially the youngest. …

How come?

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‘Like a Klingon prison’: inside Barack Obama’s audacious, near-windowless, $850m presidential library

Towering over a low-income area of Chicago, and wrapped in a speech that’s hard to decipher, this controversial monolith feels like a menacing sci-fi HQ. Is it a monument – or a mausoleum?

Oliver Wainwright

Tue 2 Jun 2026 01.00 EDT

… Behold the $850m Obamalisk – or, as it sometimes feels morbidly like, the Obamausoleum.

Obama was very, very hands on with the design. He wanted to make things more angular and cut

… “We had the idea of a beacon,” says architect Billie Tsien, whose practice, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, won the design competition for the Obama Presidential Center in 2016, on the eve of the first Trump presidency. “We thought of four hands coming together,” she adds, holding her cupped hands up against a colleague’s, as if protecting a flame from the wind.

The Williams-Tsien design firm is probably best known for the 2012 Barnes Foundation art museum in Philadelphia:

Above us, sheer walls of granite erupt from the ground at a steep angle, before tapering to form a chiselled 70-metre-high monolith. It looks hewn and cleft, towering over the 19-acre campus like a stocky, truncated obelisk. Rising above the low-rise, low-income neighbourhood, the building has an ominous presence, its mostly windowless heft recalling a menacing sci-fi headquarters, with small chamfered openings suggesting portals from where drones might be launched, or lasers fired. Some have compared it to a flak tower, others to a “Klingon prison”. If it is a beacon of hope, it seems to be one that has been fortified at all costs against the present regime, a defensive bunker to protect its fragile values from siege.

“The president was very, very hands on with the design,” says Tsien, with a rueful air. “He talked a lot about his love of Brâncuși.”

The Obama Center looks like a Brutalist botching of the elegant Brancusi, “Golden Bird,” on display at the Art Institute of Chicago:

That’s the Romanian sculptor who was known for his carved, abstract forms. “And he wanted to make things more angular and cut. To make a form, and then try to work out what goes inside it, is really the opposite of how we’ve worked before. It was a very foreign exercise.”

Obama has spoken of wanting to be an architect, before he chose law, and he clearly relished the chance to wield his conceptual chisel.

Obama has spoken of architect Vladimir Ossipoff’s “Hawaiian modernism,”

such as Liljestrand House, which looks like a nice post-hippie era motel, and the chapel at Punahou School.

“When you have a client who says that, you get kind of …

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Spielberg has a UFO movie Disclosure Day coming out next weekend, so he’s doing a lot of interviews.

From the New York Times:

What Steven Spielberg Taught Me About Fear, Catharsis, and Being Human

Hollywood is struggling, but Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, joys and sorrows.

By Wesley Morris

Wesley Morris won a Pulitzer in 2012 for being a gay film critic and then won a Pulitzer in 2021 for being a black film critic. If he ever goes blind, he’ll win a third Pulitzer for being a blind film critic.

June 7, 2026

On Jan. 1, something amazing happened. Steven Spielberg, a longtime Angeleno and most people’s dictionary definition of “Hollywood director,” became a New York City resident.

What flabbergasting reason could Spielberg possibly have had for registering as a resident of New York State on January 1, 2026?

Was there something special about 1/1/2026?

Here are the NYT’s quasi-explanations:

On the one hand, this is a significant event. What classic Spielberg location requires a 212 or 718 or 646 to phone home? On the other hand, he has made five of his last six movies in New York State, including his exuberant, ominous reconsideration of “West Side Story.” Plus, for decades, Spielberg has kept a place on the Upper West Side. Five of his seven children live here, and all six of his grandchildren.

This is a mildly interesting statistical factoid. If you are trust funders born with a famous name and raised in Pacific Palisades, the most paradisiacal part of Los Angeles up through January 6, 2025, do you stay in L.A. or move to N.Y.?

For awhile in the second half of the 20th Century, everybody thought you were thought crazy to move to NYC from LA.

For example, in the mid-1990s, a fellow I distantly knew signed a big one-year contract with the New York Yankees. He and his bride talked it over and came to the conclusion: We’re newlyweds without kids yet, we’re suddenly rich, we can afford the taxes and rent, so let’s try living in Manhattan for a year!

But he was the only Yankee out of 25 that year to reside within New York City.

Now, with lower crime rates in New York City, it’s much more common among Yankees.

Although it’s still not for everyone — for example, when slugger Giancarlo Stanton signed with the Yankees, he got off to a notoriously slow start in home games that first season. Stanton is another Valley Boy who went to my high school, Notre Dame of Sherman Oaks. His dad, a postman from Panorama City, who was helping him move in to his Manhattan apartment, admitted to the press that they were both kind of freaked out trying to adjust to the bright lights big city.

So yeah: no big whoop. It was simply time. But to a New Yorker, this is a meaningful move: as if Magic Johnson had spent the rest of his career playing at the Garden.

And Spielberg is still playing. He turns 80 in December. The signs of wear and tear of a half-century of moviemaking are discreet. He uses a barely-there hearing aid, and his gait is a tad slower than maybe he’d like. He has become an insole guy. (“I’m on my feet as a director my whole life. My feet have gotten as flat as a pancake.”) The mellower pace of Los Angeles suits his temperament.

But Spielberg still officially stopped being a resident of California on January 1, 2026.

How come?

Well, the NYT isn’t going to be so impolite as mention two reasons the deep-pocketed Democrat donor would find politically embarrassing:

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From the BBC:

Giant banquets rile radical left in France

2 hours ago

Hugh Schofield

Paris correspondent

Three-and-a-half-thousand hungry Alsatians wolf down platters of charcuterie and periodically burst into noisy chorus.

No, it is not the police dogs’ annual convention, but the latest iteration of a feasting phenomenon that is sweeping provincial France.

The Alsace town of Colmar – famous for its half-timbered medieval centre – was the scene last weekend of one of the banquets géants – huge banquets whose popularity in the country has suddenly become a hot political issue.

Run by a company called Le Canon Français (The French Cannon), the banquets are massively attended – €81 (£70) buying you four courses of local gastronomy, all the wine you can drink, and several hours of sing-along camaraderie.

The French peasantry had been one of the big winners from the French Revolution, often winding up as small landowners after centuries of toiling for the aristocrats. This drove Karl Marx crazy in his brilliant work of political journalism, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Because Emperor Napoleon I had won the loyalty of the rural masses by confirming that the peasantry could keep the land they had acquired during the 1790s, the peasantry supported his nephew in becoming first President Bonaparte and then Emperor Napoleon III.

Marx was outraged that the 1789 revolution had managed to create a new conservative majority by giving land to the rural laborers, who voted differently than his darlings, the urban laborers.

But the peasantry enjoyed their new found prosperity and developed a level of cuisine seldom before seen among European masses.

But not everyone is cheering. For the radical left party La France Insoumise (LFI - France Unbowed), the banquets have a dark side.

LFI, founded by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is a major force in French politics. Mélenchon just missed out on making the two-person runoff for President of France in both 2017, when he won 20% in the primary, and 22% in 2022.

Disillusioned by the Soviet actions Czechoslovakia 1968, Mélenchon joined the Trotskyite International Communist Organization and then moved over to the Socialists. He led the left wing of the Socialists, then formed his own party of the Left in the 2000s.

LFI says it has evidence of racist chanting, and of immigrant staff being insulted. With pork regularly on the menu, they say the feasts are purposely designed to exclude Muslims and vegetarians.

How dare Frenchmen go to banquets in France that serve traditional French cuisine?

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I recently read John Le Carre’s famously intricate novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy about high-IQ malfeasance within MI6. But the new scandal in which Senior Executive Service-level (i.e., above GS-15) CIA manager David J. Rush was caught with $40 million in gold stashed at home makes it sound like the CIA is in real life run by Chad Feldheimer and his colleagues at the Hardbodies gym:

From the Washington Post news section:

CIA officer who had millions in gold bars accused of creating fake spy program

… June 5, 2026 at 7:54 p.m. EDT

By Warren P. Strobel, Ellen Nakashima and Katie Mettler

The former senior CIA official found with more than $40 million worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use, according to people familiar with the criminal investigation. …

… The science and technology directorate is the arm of the agency that creates technical espionage tools to aid U.S. spies and their agents abroad.

The account of those familiar with the criminal probe appears to raise serious questions about secrecy guardrails and vetting at the CIA.

It remains unclear, for example, how Rush could single-handedly create a “black box” for a fictional spy program without sign-off from his superiors. It is also unclear whether the two colleagues Rush brought into the fake program knew it was fraudulent.

One of the people familiar with the probe said Rush’s fake program involved “continuity of government” operations, or programs to keep the U.S. federal government running in the event of nuclear war, natural disasters or other catastrophes.

Rush apparently used the fake government continuity program and the contract to persuade a government defense contractor to purchase large amounts of gold, this person said.

Did Rush explain in his paperwork that after the Apocalypse, the only currency the Warriors of the Wasteland would take to fight for the President is cold gold?

Even more astounding, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the issue, is that Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Well, that’s fun to speculate about: What does this tippy-top secret program do?

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In a First, Scientists Precisely Edit Human Embryo Genes

Researchers relied on a newer gene-editing technique that may make it possible to engineer embryos, a prospect that has long alarmed bioethicists.

By Carl Zimmer

June 4, 2026

Scientists at Columbia University have edited the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy, an achievement that could open the way to babies engineered with particular characteristics.

The prospect has fueled controversy for years. On the one hand, the technology might one day enable parents to safely repair disease-causing mutations in embryos. But it might also be used to select desired traits — a practice that some ethicists have argued is nothing short of eugenics.

Dieter Egli, a geneticist at Columbia University who led the research, called for a public conversation about the pros and cons of altering embryonic DNA. “As a scientist, you can provide the data for discussion, but then essentially there you stop and let others take over,” he said.

With a newer technology called base editing, Dr. Egli and his colleagues were able to meticulously replace individual genetic letters in sequences of DNA without causing the damage often observed with an earlier form of gene editing, CRISPR.

Dr. Egli cautioned that the research left unanswered many questions about harmful side effects. “We’re not saying this is going to be used tomorrow in the clinics,” he said.

Dr. Egli and his colleagues posted their study online. The research is under review for publication in a scientific journal.

The possibility of editing the DNA of human embryos became a matter of serious debate more than a decade ago, after the invention of CRISPR.

… In 2023, the Food and Drug Administration approved a CRISPR-based treatment for sickle cell anemia.

Sickle cell anemia is the classic big bad candidate gene that scientists have talking about using genetic engineering against for generations. The sickle cell mutation was a quick and dirty evolutionary response that emerged in Africa since the last Ice Age in response to the huge new menace posed by falciparum malaria in the tropics. Fortunately, we don’t have that kind of malaria in the U.S., so we don’t need the serious health trade-off it imposes.

And genetic engineering against sickle cell anemia is finally happening. About 100 people have so far received CRISPR genetic engineering therapy for sickle cell anemia.

It’s remarkable that doctors can now sometimes use genetic engineering to change the genome of people who have already been born.

But scientists knew it was not perfect. In some cells, CRISPR molecules failed to find their targets in DNA, or sometimes snipped out the wrong genetic bits.

… But the repair failed in about half of them. …

Many scientists and bioethicists saw these results as further evidence that editing human embryos was far too risky to even consider — at least, for the time being.

But in 2016, David Liu, a geneticist at Harvard University, and colleagues combined one of the CRISPR molecules with other compounds to create base editing, a new method for editing genes. …

Base editing has proved to be often superior to earlier CRISPR methods. Last year, a baby was cured of a potentially lethal genetic disorder after receiving a customized set of base editing molecules. …

Despite those failures, the new results were strong enough that Dr. Paula Amato, a fertility expert at Oregon Health & Science University who was not involved in the study, thought the method was “promising.” …

Ana Iltis, a bioethicist at Wake Forest University, worried that assessing the safety of base-edited embryos will require far more scrutiny than simply looking for damaged chromosomes.

“It is possible that some of the potentially harmful effects would not be evident until after birth,” she warned.

Nathan Treff, the chief clinical officer of Nucleus Genomics and a co-author of the new study, said that the ability to fix disease-causing mutations in embryos could be a boon to those using I.V.F., allowing them to implant embryos that they otherwise would have discarded.

“There’s still work to do before getting to that point, but this research gets us closer,” Dr. Treff said.

Nucleus Genomics will support the next stage of Dr. Egli’s research. (The federal government does not fund studies on human embryos for research purposes.)

From Wikipedia on Nucleus Genomics:

After establishing the company, Sadeghi raised about $32 million in funding, including from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital company.

The company states that it uses what it calls “genetic optimization” in order to estimate the likelihood of a number of genetic traits of an embryo, including its IQ score, eye and hair color, height, and its predisposition to having certain diseases, such as autism, Type 2 diabetes, and cancer. The company adds its embryo polygenic scoring to the conventional PGT analyses done by other labs.

In 2025, the company launched a feature for prospective parents to assess how their DNA would align. According to Sadeghi, the feature examines “a couple’s DNA, and we calculate their risk of passing down over 900 different conditions to their children.”

Various people such as Arthur Kaplan, Sasha Gusev, and Eric Turkheimer have lambasted Nucleus Genomics as …

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The two best baseball players of the 2020s have been the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, a unique big leaguer who both pitches and bats as the Designated Hitter, and the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge, a gigantic outfielder. But now Judge has sat out the last three games as doctors try to figure out what is physically wrong with him. The most worrisome possibility at present is thoracic outlet syndrome, which tends to plague muscular ballplayers (typically pitchers).

That got me wondering over a few questions about the 34 year old Judge.

First, if he never plays again, is he worthy of the Hall of Fame?

The answer is: of course.

Granted, Judge’s career hasn’t been that long. At 6’7” and 282 pounds, he was something of a project, so his rookie year came at age 25 in 2017 when he hit 52 homers. Then he had four straight fine but not great seasons in his late 20s, before turning into an all-time great at age 30 in 2022 when he broke Roger Maris’s famous American League homer record by hitting 62.

Judge has had four great seasons: 2017, 2022, 2024, and 2025, with over 50 homers in each. 2023 might have been a fifth great season, but he crashed his toe into the stupid concrete lip around the Dodger Stadium outfield:

The Dodgers actually have enough money to fix Dodger Stadium so that it doesn’t injure players like this.

Judge hits for power, walks, and (unusually in the current era) batting average, leading the majors last season with a .331 average. (He doesn’t steal much, but he has been a pretty good outfielder, sometimes switching to center from right field.)

He’s already over the usual Hall of Fame benchmark of 60 Wins Above Replacement with 64.5 for his career.

Wins Above Replacement is a synthetic measure intended to quantify all aspects of winning baseball games, although who knows how scientific it is? I’m using the Baseball Reference version of WAR (bWAR), although experts seem to prefer the Fangraphs version (fWAR).

And Judge’s four peak seasons have been heroic, accounting for 39.5 WAR compared to, say, Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s four season peak of 36.4. (The peak in this century since steroid testing was introduced for top four seasons has been Mike Trout’s 40.3.)

Second, are contemporary ballplayers on PEDs like the stars of 30 years ago were?

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Why Does No One Care About the World Cup This Year?

June 3, 2026

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

They used to call the World Cup, unequivocally, the planet’s biggest sporting event. But it is about to start, right here in North America, and no one much seems to care.

My guess is that once the World Cup starts in a week, you’ll hear so much about it that you’ll get sick of it.

But, yeah, there is so much entertainment available these days that people don’t get excited a week beforehand by reading a Special Preview Issue of Sports Illustrated or whatever. Instead, you wait until the last moment, then skim something online, and you’re ready to go.

For example, last winter, lots of people were posting about how the Winter Olympics is practically here, and yet nobody is talking about it: it’s totally different from the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding Olympics when we were 13! Obviously, the Winter Olympics are doomed!

But then the Winter Olympics actually started and they turned out to be the usual entertaining diversion they always are (even if I won’t remember much about them until the 2030 Winter Olympics come around — “Oh yeah, remember last time when she slipped? That was so sad.”)

But let’s listen to the reasons put forward for why the World Cup is dead, because, who knows, they might turn out to be true this time:

Thousands of tickets remain unsold, and just weeks ago, others were being resold well below their official price.

One reason is because nobody yet has much of a clue what the real price of tickets will turn out to be. FIFA, the soccer monopoly, is no doubt playing sophisticated Econ 402 profit maximization games. From the Daily Mail:

FIFA accused of colluding with ticket resale platforms in desperate attempt to shift seats at low-interest World Cup games - despite warning fans not to buy from resellers

By MIKE KEEGAN, CHIEF SPORTS REPORTER

Published: 08:55 EDT, 3 June 2026

… The organisation has consistently warned fans not to buy tickets from resale platforms and instead use its own service, however, Austrian economist Florian Ederer spotted what he feels is evidence of a bid to sell tickets and swerve legal action. He posted a seat map on X showing the highlighted areas.

‘I believe we now have evidence of FIFA’s World Cup ticketing shell game,’ he explained. …

‘FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management. Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections. The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.’

Ederer added: ‘That’s not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA’s official site.’

Ederer then went on to explain his thoughts on why FIFA would take such an alleged step.

‘Why doesn’t FIFA just lower prices on its own site? Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.

‘Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.’

Some have also pointed out that seats in the same areas for the match cost $700 on FIFA’s resale platform and $200 on SeatGeek.

Oh, man, only $200 to see Saudi Arabia vs. Cape Verde.

I’m there!

Seriously, 2026 is not like 1994 when the World Wide Web had just barely been invented So FIFA had to print up a brochure months ahead of time with its best guesses at its optimal prices.

My impression is that the world has gotten better for sellers because sellers can now afford to play all the theoretical profit maximization games I heard about from economics professors in 1976-1982, but that almost nobody could implement in the real world at the time. This helps explain why the Dow Jones average is now over 50,000 while it was under 1,000 back then.

Am I …

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What’s the Matter With California?

June 3, 2026

By Josh Barro

Mr. Barro, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the newsletter Very Serious and the host of the podcast “Serious Trouble.”

… But there’s also a broader anti-development sensibility among many Californians: an idea that the state is “full,”

Much of California, especially the 148 miles of coastal zone between Santa Barbara and Hearst Castle, is not full. On the other hand, it’s striking that one of the nicest parts of the U.S. is just sort of sitting there with a bunch of Happy Cows on it, but not much else:

that dense development is anti-environmental and that leafy, low-density suburban jurisdictions like Marin County are the best representation of what it is to live in harmony with nature.

I don’t know whether the mellow Marin County hot tub lifestyle is the best for nature, but it’s likely the highest standard of living in the United States for its lucky quarter of a million human residents (down 3% from 2020 to 2025).

Among the state’s remaining Republicans, you may hear a different version of the anti-development thesis, which is that California’s existing stock of homes would suffice if there weren’t so many illegal immigrants.

There’s also a financial reason voters are ambivalent about fixing the housing crisis: If you increase the supply of homes, the price of homes will tend to go down, which is great for people looking to buy a home but not so great for people who already own a home. Mr. Trump expressed this idea with unusual frankness in January, saying: “There’s so much talk about, ‘Oh, we’re going to drive housing prices down.’ I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes, and they can be assured, that’s what’s going to happen.”

There’s one added fact about California that encourages complacency: It’s paradise. The state’s vast swaths of detached-house suburbia can’t house enough people within commuting distance of job centers in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, but they represent an American ideal of suburban living in perfect weather. The state’s leading metro areas remain highly productive places to do business, with that productivity only increasing with the A.I. boom in the San Francisco Bay Area.

With Anthropic and SpaceX going public (and OpenAI probably to follow), California will likely enjoy another brief respite from its perennial budget crisis, as in 2004 when Google’s public offering provided Sacramento with a much-needed windfall.

California’s hills are incredibly scenic places to live, even if the homes above Los Angeles are barely insurable because of fire risk. It’s not hard to see how a long-settled homeowner with a nice house and a yard and a strong local economy and a low property tax bill courtesy of Proposition 13 might look around and resist the idea that the state needs to change much.

So, what could the next governor do with state politicians to change all this? First, they will need to do a better job of arguing that building more housing will improve the quality of life even for the Californians who already own homes.

After an immense increase from 1920 through 1990, the city of Los Angeles’s population growth slowed in the early 21st Century. And then total numbers dropped slightly in the early years of this decade:

(Note: nobody really knows how many people crowd into places like eastern Hollywood. For decades, American governments have gone out of their way not to count the number of people living in illegal alien havens.)

Similarly, the parts of Los Angeles County that are not in the Los Angeles City may have dropped even faster in total population in this decade.

So has the immense Greater Los Angeles five county area, which is said to have dropped from 18.6 million to 18.3 million in this decade.

So, “Los Angeles” is not like, say, Atlanta or Dallas, where the official municipality has barely grown lately, but the suburbs are booming. However expansively you want to define L.A. (big city, huge county, or enormous metro area), its population shrank from 2020 at least through 2023. (Similarly, the state of California is said to have dropped 0.5% from 2020 to 2025.)

Has that made life worse for those left in Southern California? …

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Of course, countries like Paraguay don’t have mail ballots coming in by slow boat and migrant caravan from Honduras, Guatelombia, the Galapagos Islands, the Kerguelen Islands, Transnistria, Abbottabad, Abkhazia, Azkaban, Raqqa, Narnia, and The Republic of Pirates.

Nor do these Third World countries have to provide, by legislation or court order, ballots in English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Armenian, Navajo, Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Panjabi, Punjabi, Hmong, Mixtec, Esperanto, Hittite, Proto-Indo-European, Klingon, Linear B, Linear A, !San Clickspeak, Shavian Alphabet, Incan Knot Lingo, Runic, Voynich Manuscript, Semaphore, Canary Islands Whistle Speech, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, American Sign Language, Thieves’ Argot, Pig Latin, Smoke Signals, Ouija Board, Enigma Encryption, Turing Machine, General Semantics, System Basic, Cityspeak, Telepathy, Dolphin, Assembler, COBOL, Coco Sign Language, HTML, PDF, Graffiti, Gang Signs, Tattoos, SMS, Bitcoin, and Emoji, plus certain languages spoken only by individual pairs of identical twins.

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The New York Times architecture critic really doesn’t like the Obama Monument to Self in Chicago’s Jackson Park:

Obama Center’s Two Sides: A Lovely Park and a Forbidding Tower

In Chicago, the $850 million Obama Presidential Center aims to remake a neighborhood with a 19.3-acre community hub and a brooding 225-foot museum.

By Michael Kimmelman, Visuals by Lyndon French

June 2, 2026

The Obama Presidential Center has dropped on Chicago’s South Side. Its signature building is a blocky, granite-clad museum tower that the former president wanted to look like four upraised hands.

Maybe it’s me but I don’t see it.

I see a boulder in a park.

The center arrives after years of planning, $850 million in private fund-raising, spasms of community blowback, and eye-rolling about the glamorous, brooding, unapologetic 225-foot-tall “Obamalisk.”

The architecture is certainly ambitious and formidable. The center is built for the ages to celebrate the nation’s first Black president.

It’s also the tallest monument yet to presidential self-glorification, although the current occupant of the Oval Office is contemplating a post-presidential billboard on the Miami skyline that would be several times taller.

… When sunlight after a rain turns the gray stone pink, the building can look like a beacon.

But from other angles, it’s cold and forbidding.

Note that June 2 is likely the nicest, freshest, greenest day of the year in Chicago. What will this gray behemoth look like on January 2?

Besides bone-chilling?

That’s a jarring vibe for a project whose most groundbreaking ambition is to reimagine the presidential library as a warm, welcoming community hub. …

The tower’s top floor, called the Sky Room, opens onto panoramic views of Chicago through letters made of precast concrete, pigmented to match the stone facade. The words are culled from a presidential speech in 2015 commemorating the march on Selma, Ala. …

But little of this uplifting messaging is made explicit on the outside.

From the street the carved granite words from Selma are illegible, the lettering bunched together like Cheerios in a box.

I’ve seen hundreds of pictures of the building, but I’ve never once mustered the willpower to try to decipher the words.

You just know that it won’t be worth the effort. But … that it also won’t be amusingly bad either …

Okay, here’s the Obama oratory:

You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.

Like I expected: dull, but not bad enough to be funny.

Back to the NYT:

Standing just below it in Jackson Park, the tower looms like a castle keep, its mass and height in tension with the park’s pastoral beauty and origins. …

Jackson Park dates back to the 1870s. Olmsted and Vaux, the geniuses behind Central Park, were its original designers. …

Turning prized public parkland over to a private foundation irked local community groups who argued there were better locations for the center, including vacant lots bordering Washington Park, another Olmsted creation to the west, which needed the investment more.

Jackson Park won out because the Obamas reportedly preferred its proximity to Lake Michigan and the Museum of Science and Industry.

Amenity-laden Jackson Park is between the lakefront and upscale Hyde Park, home to the well-policed U. of Chicago. Washington Park is only a mile inland, but it’s in the ‘hood.

Local groups also pressed the Obama Foundation to enter into community benefit agreements to safeguard affordable housing in the area and forestall gentrification. The foundation declined.

But the foundation has delivered on other commitments it made to improve Jackson Park and to bring perks to the neighborhood. …

The highway’s removal allowed Van Valkenburgh, Williams and Tsien to knit Jackson Park together again and to weave the Obama campus into it. The museum tower glowers like the Eye of Sauron but other buildings on campus are skillfully masked from Jackson Park. …

The library’s roof supports the fruit and vegetable garden. An underground garage provides a base for a sledding hill that borders a wetland retreat that can retain storm water during heavy rains.

The sledding hill sounds like the nicest feature. Chicago is extraordinarily flat, so there’s no place for kids to sled in winter except on artificial slopes like Cricket Hill on the north lakefront.

There’s also a good-looking public library and a public athletic facility, which sound like they can’t hurt.

I can imagine children playing there, and, its tower loved or not, the center becoming a South Side staple and a beehive for local residents.

Too bad about the huge, ugly building, though.

Why are there …

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Due to 2024 Vibe Shift, gay pride month is less of a media obsession than it used to be.

Still, baseball stadiums tend to be in big cities -- e.g., Wrigley Field is about a mile from Boystown in Chicago. Gays tend to be well-organized in politics, so baseball franchises want their city councilmen on their side.

In big cities, the gay male voting bloc tends to be one of the more pro-business tendencies: lots of gay small businessmen who appreciate the ballpark for bringing well-heeled crowds into the city.

Granted, I'm generalizing from the Chicago Cubs.

The one MLB franchise that doesn't have a "Pride Night" is …

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But, Conley did something unusual among academics interested in nature vs. nurture. He got a second Ph.D. in biology from NYU in 2014.

His expertise on both sides of the big divide is annoying to more conventional academics, as this review of his latest book, The Social Genome, in the New York Review of Books shows:

Not in Your Genome

M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin

M.W. Feldman is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biology at Stanford and the founder and codirector of Stanford’s Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics.

Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford. Her book The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was published this spring.

Generations of “sociobiologists” have tried and failed to argue that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding social inequality. A new book fares no better.

June 11, 2026 issue

Reviewed: The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture by Dalton Conley

Norton, 292 pp., $29.99

It turns out that if you begin an assertion with “it turns out” and sprinkle it with statistics and acronyms—especially if it’s expressed in the passive voice and followed by a footnote—up to 83 percent of the variation in whether people buy it is explained by their SCI (science credulity index) and 78 percent by their BDS (baloney detection score).

Here’s how it works. “It turns out,” writes Dalton Conley, the Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology at Princeton, in his new book The Social Genome, “that almost every trait that has been studied is at least partially influenced” by genetic differences, including “about 40 percent” of the variation in how far people advance in school. “For income,” he continues, “it’s 70 percent. For cognitive ability, 75 percent.” Turning to the footnote, we find no evidence but instead a further assertion that PGIs (“polygenic indices”)—statistical treatments of genetic variants—are “incredibly useful for studying the social world.”

The reviewers are shocked, shocked to hear that nature influences nurture (and vice-versa).

This is Conley’s central claim: that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding not just people’s biology but their social environment. To grasp what a PGI is, you need another acronym, GWAS, for “genome-wide association study.” …

Conley is a true believer in the power of the PGI. “We can take a saliva sample from a baby,” he writes, extract its DNA, calculate a PGI, and “predict that baby’s odds of completing college.” (He adds the caveat that the predictiveness of the PGI depends on the environment, and if the society changes, “all bets are off.” But this is trivially true and therefore not really a caveat, as we will see.) Elsewhere in The Social Genome he writes that PGIs “have become the FICO scores of human genetics” and declares that “the PGI, with its X-ray powers, has revealed the hidden logic of social life.”

According to Conley, a PGI is “a single number that summarize[s] a person’s genetic tendency for a particular disease or trait—for instance, blood pressure, height, or cognitive functioning.” But one of these things is not like the others. It’s easy to measure height and possible to measure blood pressure, though even in these cases there’s no causal pathway from DNA to trait, since height and blood pressure are highly polygenic, meaning that researchers have found minute correlations with thousands of regions of the DNA as well as epigenetic and environmental factors. “Cognitive functioning,” on the other hand, is difficult to define, let alone to measure.

How about if you are trying to predict who will subscribe to the highbrow New York Review of Books? I mean, it’s pretty weird that writers for the New York Review act like cognitive functioning is utterly impossible to measure when they almost all got measured repeatedly when young and did very well on tests.

And what percentage of regular readers of the NYRoB would score below 100 on an IQ test?

And yet throughout The Social Genome Conley assumes that nebulous personal qualities can be not only quantified as though they were straightforward physical characteristics but also correlated with genetic variants to predict the course of people’s lives.

Well, yeah, quantifying personal qualities has been a giant project in the human sciences for well over a century.

The evidence that polygenic scores have this kind of predictive power is between extremely weak and nonexistent. (In fact Conley’s assertion that genes can help predict a baby’s odds of completing college is apparently contradicted by his own research: a 2022 article on which he’s listed twenty-seventh of forty authors states that “the PGI cannot be used to meaningfully predict” an individual’s educational attainment.)

The study that the reviewers cite of 3 million individuals (mostly of European descent) found that about 75% of those who score in the top decile in PGI scores go on to college vs. about 25% of those in the lowest decile. On the other hand, PGI only accounted for about 12% to 16% of total variance, quite a bit less than would be expected from twin and adoption studies.

We shall see over the next decade or two or three how that is resolved.

And of course educational attainment is hardly determined solely by genes. For example, a 100 IQ white kid in New England is probably quite a bit more likely to go to college rather than join the military compared to a 100 IQ white kid in the coal-mining belt.

Scientists look at educational attainment a lot because it’s a checkbox on a huge variety of medical forms. And, whether trustworthy or not, they trust it more than asking people to guess their IQs. (And medical forms seldom include cognitive tests to avoid discouraging people in need of medical care.)

Statistical genetics hasn’t led to new understandings of diseases or medical therapies, as Conley acknowledges, and its validity remains unproven in the biomedical sciences.

In the social sciences, meanwhile, not only are the traits in question often difficult or impossible to define or measure; the correlations also have no demonstrated causal meaning. Conley twice repeats the familiar adage that “correlation is not causation.” You might find a statistically significant correlation between, say, a genetic variant that makes it difficult to metabolize alcohol, common in East Asian populations, and the use of chopsticks, but such a correlation would obviously be causally meaningless. (Conley even discusses an article titled “Beware the Chopsticks Gene.”)

But wouldn’t genetics that simply discourage you from becoming an alcoholic be of some potential life and social importance?

There was a life-long longitudinal study of Harvard students from around 1940 (JFK was one of the subjects). One of the big things it found was that among privileged kids born on third base, whether or not they became alcoholics was a huge factor in how their lives turned out.

Similarly, a lot of talented aboriginal individuals have struggled with binge drinking since their ancestors only became exposed to alcohol a limited number of generations ago.

And yet his book posits lots of hypothetical “pathways” connecting PGIs with cognitive and behavioral traits. The implication is that these contain causal mechanisms, but neither Conley nor anyone else has ever identified any.

We know a lot about genetic pathways that lower IQ, like many types of mental retardation. The genetic pathways that raise IQ are more complex, just as the blueprints that make your car work are more complicated than the dead battery that keeps your car from working right now.

In 2022 we reviewed another book that ascribes cognitive and behavioral traits to genetic causes.

Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery, which I reviewed in 2021.

We think it’s important to confront these claims and the movement they represent, which Conley variously calls “sociogenomics,” “behavioral genetics (or BG as it is known),” “genoeconomics,” and “biosociology,” the last an inversion of the 1970s term “sociobiology.” This movement includes prominent faculty at elite universities and commands an increasingly wide audience. The Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, the main association for sociogenomics, founded in 2011, has grown into a multi-institution international collaboration that draws millions of dollars in grants and uses data from millions of people.

“Millions of dollars”!

Sounds pretty sinister!

A surge in the production of PGIs in recent years has led to their increasing prominence in popular writing and culture and their widening use outside research settings. For instance, in assisted reproduction, companies now offer to test embryos for PGIs that purportedly influence traits such as intelligence.

Well, how soon can we find out if these companies’ services work or not? Another 5 or 10 years for the children born from them to reach the age, around 8, at which IQ tests give pretty stable results?

Yet the claims of sociogenomics are dangerously misleading and essentially groundless. Its advocates use spurious scientism—an alphabet soup of acronyms and elaborate statistical practices that exploit vast, cheaply accessible genetic databases—to disguise social ideologies as scientific facts.

Feldman and Riskin seem pretty irate.

“Today, I am a self-proclaimed biosociologist,” Conley announces in chapter 3 of his book, but this wasn’t how he began. His dissertation in sociology, which he completed at Columbia in 1996, treated the “racial wealth gap” in relation to other social disparities. Later, however, he questioned his conclusions. “Perhaps,” he recalls thinking, “the parents’ assets, per se, didn’t drive a child’s success…but rather the underlying traits that led the parents to accumulate the assets.” He decided that he and other sociologists had been wrong when they “waved away the huge effects of genes.” From there he embarked on a quest to discover the genetic causes of “wealth accumulation,” which he aptly if puzzlingly likens to Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick.

To represent the relationship between genes and environment, Conley uses the metaphor of a Möbius strip. Imagine a twisted loop of paper that appears to have two surfaces, but if you trace either with your finger, you soon find yourself tracing the other, showing that there’s just one continuous surface. Genes and environment, Conley writes, are a Möbius-like continuum, because genes have different effects in different environments, while they also, he says, mold your social environment in various ways. They direct you toward genetically similar people. They send you to college or to a low-wage job in the service sector. They evoke certain treatment by your parents and teachers. They act within your family and friends, shaping their behavior toward you.

For many readers the claim that genetics affects social and economic success will carry a whiff of biological determinism in general and of scientific racism in particular. It has become standard in Conley’s field for authors to reassure readers on both counts. We needn’t worry that there’s a risk of scientific racism in sociogenomics, they argue, because their claims aren’t, for the moment, “portable.” Conley cautions that “PGIs have been developed and work within only a given ancestral population” and that “comparing PGIs across groups tells us nothing about genetic differences between those groups.” He also writes that it’s “fairly clear” that social causes such as Jim Crow and redlining were the “primary drivers of racial wealth gaps,” although elsewhere he says that in his dissertation he “overlooked” the importance of “pedigree” and that “genetics played a much bigger role in the lives of the children I studied than I had imagined.”

As for biological determinism more generally, Conley sometimes seems to avoid deterministic formulations, for instance by invoking “influences” rather than “causes.” He writes, for example, that society became more tolerant of homosexuality after “the discovery of the biological (read: genetic) influences on sexual orientation,” and he suggests the same might happen with addiction and depression once people understand that “genes influence important outcomes.” (The “gay gene” claims of the 1990s have been thoroughly debunked.)

Where are we at in 2026 with the causes of male exclusive homosexuality, anyway? …

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By now, he’s pretty much burned through all the straightforward ethnic questions, so lately he’s into more complicated ones, like Irish and Italian counties:

Somebody should make a gritty white ethnic TV cop drama about police partners named O'Hallihan and Linguini set in that one Irish & Italian county in the scenic San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado.

But …

That’s disappointing.

Now, that’s the spirit!

I'd watch a show about a weird Twin Peaks-type small town in the Rockies where the FBI sticks all the country’s turncoat State’s Evidence gangsters.

Reminds me of my pitch for …

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