The good news is that America abolished aristocracy
by digby
The bad news is that we actually haven’t:
Many Americans are uncomfortable with the idea that two families could dominate the presidency that way. Whether or not you like one of the candidates, it just doesn’t feel right, in part because a second Bush-Clinton election makes a mockery of our self-identification as a democratic meritocracy.
How bad is America’s nepotism problem? Can data science help us gauge its depth? It can — and what the data shows is that something has gone haywire.
I studied the probability of male baby boomers’ reaching the same level of success as their fathers. I had to limit myself to fathers and sons because this was a highly sexist period in which women held few powerful political positions.
Let’s start with the presidency. Thirteen sons of presidents were born during America’s baby boom. One of the 13 became president himself, of course, and Jeb would make a second. Of the roughly 37 million boomer males who weren’t born to a president, two won the White House. Maybe it’s an anomaly that George W. Bush became president in 2001, but his advent means that in our era a son of a president was roughly 1.4 million times more likely to become president than his supposed peers.
The presidency is obviously a small sample. But the same calculations can be done for other political positions. Take governors.
Because it is difficult to be sure that you have counted all the sons of governors, let’s assume that governors reproduce at average rates. This would mean there were about 250 baby boomer males born to governors. Five of them became governors themselves, about one in 50. This is 6,000 times the rate of the average American. The same methodology suggests that sons of senators had an 8,500 times higher chance of becoming a senator than an average American male boomer.
Perhaps you noticed the little “problem” with this thesis about the two “dynasties”:
I studied the probability of male baby boomers’ reaching the same level of success as their fathers. I had to limit myself to fathers and sons because this was a highly sexist period in which women held few powerful political positions.
Uhm, has there been another period in which women held a lot of powerful political positions? Is there any data at all that suggests that the presidency is nepotistic in the same way for women and men? Since there has never been a woman president of any kind, I’m going to say no. In fact, there is no obvious path to power for women because … there just aren’t very many women in power. There have been none at the level of president.
Moreover, Bill Clinton came from the lower middle class in Arkansas and Hillary Clinton was born into a nice upper middle class family in Illinois. Neither of them were legacy students to fancy prep schools or the Ivy League colleges they attended. She was valedictorian of her class and graduated at the very top. He was a Rhodes scholar. They had no family connections — they both made it on their own. Bill ran for office as a young man and succeeded early not because Hillary was less qualified but because she was a woman and there just wasn’t the same opportunity. She certainly had the same ambition and qualifications from the get-go.
That she is running now is the natural consequence of being a woman of her time and being married to a politician. Now if Chelsea decides to run, you might rightfully claim she is the beneficiary of all the money, power and status her parents achieved. But Bill and Hill, flawed as they are, are a power couple who both worked their way up the political ladder together without family connections. That’s not dynasty.
Now the Bushes …
Has any modern family dominated a meritocracy the way that the Bushes dominate politics? I could not find one. The Mannings, in football, probably come closest. But while Archie Manning, the father of two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, Peyton and Eli, was a solid N.F.L. player, he was hardly the football equivalent of a president.
Internationally, the greatest father-son, merit-based, same-field accomplishment is probably Niels Bohr’s son Aage matching his father’s Nobel Prize in Physics. But neither the Bohrs nor the Mannings dominated physics or football the way the Bush family dominates American politics.
Regression to the mean limits family dominance in any meritocratic field. If you have a well-above-average dose of a trait, you can expect your child to be closer to average.
Regression to the mean is so powerful that once-in-a-generation talent basically never sires once-in-a-generation talent. It explains why Michael Jordan’s sons were middling college basketball players and Jakob Dylan wrote two good songs. It is why there are no American parent-child pairs among Hall of Fame players in any major professional sports league.
The Bush family’s dominance would be the basketball equivalent of Michael Jordan being the father of LeBron James and Kevin Durant — and of Michael Jordan’s father being Walt Frazier.
In other words, it is virtually impossible, statistically speaking, that Bushes are consistently the most talented people to lead our country.
No kidding. And if you look at their family tree it goes way, way, way back. Even Barbara Bush was born Barbara Pierce. As in President Franklin Pierce. Now that’s real blue blooded aristocracy…
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