rba
That’s true, but the probability mass function for total sibship size we estimate here would left-shifted if the non-survivors are absent. The reported family sizes would be smaller in kind.
I might be wrong that this would neutralize the effect you’re pointing out, but I think it does.
A sufficiently high band in the CCP could work.
I can’t tell if this is a joke, but it’s very funny even if it’s not.
Aren’t non-surviving children as likely to make a cardinal higher in pregnancy order as they are to make him lower in that order?
It would be nice if you had the sexes of the siblings, since it's supposedly only the older brothers that count, though I don't really expect that to change anything.I wanted to do that but given the Ablaza et al. results where the effect exists for all older siblings, I decided it wasn’t worth the drop in power.
I think Greg Clark has stated his new book will claim none of the observed status-related birth order effects commonly cited actually exist in a dataset with sufficient size and resolution.
Maybe my next substack post will be trying to analyze how the
exposeequilibrium changes as a function of thepercent_gayparameter.
It doesn’t look to me like non-surviving children are reported in this data, so no.
However, the reported results doesn’t change when you just look at it century by century.
I agree that birth order inversely correlating with capability is the most plausible resolution of this puzzle, though I need to check the effect sizes more studiously, and am still haunted by the ghost of Judith Rich Harris.
As for the traits being selected, we obviously don’t know, though the idea is that selecting for homosexuality gifts the selectors an obvious manner of control of whomever makes it into the college of cardinals.
Yeah, I think a lot of anecdata point to the fact that a pretty significant portion of the clergy are gay. The most interesting question in my view is how and why that portion might rise to very high levels ~80% once you get to Rome.