Should You Redshirt Your Son?
A new study finds that being older than your classmates helps you socially dominate them.
From a new scientific paper:
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?
Paywall here.
