I’m from a largish family for the states (4) and it seems like the personality types were less related to family size and intensely related to birth order. It’s kind of nuts how perfectly we reflect the birth order stereotypes. My husband’s family is much the same in that way.

I mean if that’s what passes for good-looking in DC, I’d hate to see what ugly is.

“Washington is Hollywood for ugly people” for sure.

(grin)

My large and general point that people should think twice any time they consider issuing a comment that a post ought not exist, has been abducted by my small and ancillary point that such posts seemed to occur disproportionately on female authors’ OPs.

I’m, uh, still engaging in hostage negotiations to recover my original point, and will issue a notification when successful. :-)

My mother was one of eleven in Ireland, and it was actually the older ones (born in the 1940s and early ‘50s) who mostly left. As Ireland and, more importantly, the family, got more prosperous, the younger ones didn’t have to leave: the money the older daughters sent home helped the younger boys go to university.

And there was a very strong expectation that no matter what, the youngest daughter would stay nearby to care for her parents in their old age (as she did).

Salient: I hereby deny that Brandon del Pozo’s thread has the right to exist, thus offsetting this comment.

Funnily enough, in my limited circle of extended family and friends, I’d say it’s more often the eldest who goes abroad to forge a path, rather than the youngest and non-inheriting. Probably because there’s nothing much to inherit. In my family, it’s siblings 1, 2 and 4 who live abroad more or less permanently. Numbers 5 and 6 have spent extended periods (a year or so) abroad, but still live in Ireland. And number 3 is an incorrigible homebird.

sensible as always and more so than this post deserves

Careful, this site apparently has a major problem with people being dismissive of posts by female contributors. :)

As to DC-ites not caring how they look, I think it’s more that they don’t want to stand out fashion-wise. They just want to ‘get it right’. The women seem only to shop in Ann Taylor Loft. Which is not a bad place to buy work clothes but it does lack flair if you don’t mix it up.

I think of myself as belonging to the last (or at least most recent) Irish generation where 4+ child families were the norm – I’m in my thirties – but I’ve never checked the numbers to verify. Although we’ve had an immigration-led baby boom the last few years, I suspect it’s due to greater numbers of parents rather than of children. Anecdotally, my generation seems to be producing about 2 kids per family.

Strictly speaking, a family should have 5+ kids to have more middle ones than eldest and youngest. But the Farrell experience mirrors Ray’s. There’s no ‘middle’ amongst us 6, just different and shifting alliances and ways to splice.

Which goes back to my original, slightly tongue in cheek assertion; that kids who grow up with several siblings might thrive more in institutional or political settings. I don’t think there’s much to it, other than an easily falsified but enjoyably discussed theory.

(And even if we assume that all of those kids with older and younger sibs are ‘middle’, I don’t think it adds up. If every family had four kids, ‘middle kids’ would be half the population, but that’s a high average to maintain. )

Hmm – actually, that doesn’t quite follow. What it predicts is that the members of a list of people who are powerful should be beautiful and also from larger-than-average families.

Which is easy to disprove by looking at a picture of the US Senate. I refuse to believe that, even in their youth, they were models of loveliness. Maybe their left shoulderblades were.

Aaargh! By the same logic, most people in Ireland are from Dublin, because Dublin’s bigger than any other city or town in Ireland…

13: no, that actually makes sense – if all the families have five or more kids, then most children will be middle children (ie not the eldest or the youngest).
But I’m not sure that was the case. In 1970 the average Irish family with children had 3.8 children.
It might, however, be the case that the eldest child tended to stay in Ireland and the younger siblings would be more likely to seek work elsewhere? That would certainly fit the pattern in other countries.

I’d speculate that there are another couple of reasons: if you’re Irish, the Irish are noticeable, especially as you know that Ireland’s a small country so you aren’t really expecting to see many of them at all. I’m sure that a Marseillaise visiting Brussels might think to herself “Gosh [or rather, parbleu], there are a lot of Marseillais here.”
Second, because Ireland is a small country, and fairly committed politically to the whole European project, it may be seen as a good thing to be Irish in the Commission bureaucracy – you’re less likely to come up against a conflict between country and Union than you would if you were British or French. (And, of course, you can speak good English, which helps in negotiations.)

As for the big families on the Hill: Hill staffers are from rich families; having lots of kids is a form of conspicuous consumption among the American upper classes.

1) Tall men (and tall women) get married earlier, get paid more, get promoted faster, and top out their promotion at a higher level (Sally MacIntyre, “Social Correlates of Human Height”, probably also more recent references I don’t know about).

2) Beautiful people probably have similar advantages (I’ve heard of a “beauty effect” but wasn’t paying attention to references).

3) Especially as height seems to be an important part of beauty (stated preference among women who use dating services for height in a male partner, probably other bits of evidence elsewhere, including male preference for taller women, subject to their not being taller than themselves?).

4) Also, people of the same class help each other out, and a family of siblings is the ultimate “class”, in terms of class loyalty.

So, beautiful people are richer and get more power, can afford to raise, educate and advance more of their children, who also help each other stay rich and powerful. Ergo, you would expect a list of people who are beautiful in a center of power to be from larger-than-average families.

Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.

QED, Washington is high school for ugly people with money.