All in the Family

...Conley devotes an interesting chapter to the ways in which various calamities can affect siblings differently, noting, for instance, that younger children are at greater risk of being directed down a less satisfying life path by a parental divorce...

...He is strong on the quickening tempo of technological change and labor mobility, which can make even very close siblings members of different "generations": there's a killer anecdote here about an older sister who was groomed to become a professional flautist—a deadA large family means fewer economic resources for each child and less attention for each one...

...A curious fact is that birth-order effects reemerge, in Conley's view, when you look closely at large families...

...Conley agrees with the consensus that in families of three or more children the middle kids may face a combination of pressure and relative neglect...

...What, in plain English, explains why some siblings succeed in life and others end up drifting, impoverished, or imprisoned...

...In the press kit, the publisher promises an "enduring classic of social analysis...

...A great deal of public attention and scholarly energy has been devoted to the "nature-nurture" argument Colby Cosh is a columnist for the National Post of Canada...

...This is a celebrity scandal...

...That said, there is a certain artistic convincingness to much of what he has to say...

...Whatever Florence King might say, there is a certain allure to the idea of a packed houseful of Cheaper by the Dozen yardapes...

...Genes may play a role here as well, though, to be sure, they are mutually interacting with a strong and largely undiscussed social prejudice...

...They pass along, for example, the wellestablished fact that the man who wrote the mediocre comedy Keeping the Faith has a history as a plagiarist...

...Conley is dismissive of identical-twin studies, but doesn't seem afraid of using inferential matching studies of non-twin siblings for his own ends...

...The worst you can say about him is that his handlers didn't pay off Barresi after they promised to...

...When Conley turns to his own one-sistered upbringing (as his previous book Honky relates, they were the only white kids in a black housing project), and unexpectedly starts ruminating on his imminent divorce, his manful effort to maintain scholarly detachment almost brings a lump to the throat...

...His tale of his interactions with the Michael Jackson machine are transparently self-serving, and the authors don't do their credibility any favors when they endorse his explanation for why he dropped a suit against the Jackson camp: "The only document of defense...made him look like a smarmy blackmailer...

...Conley interjects the stubborn truth: a large family means fewer economic resources for each child and less attention for each one...

...He has a fascinating digression on the depressing effects of obesity on female income (or, at least, white female income: the effect is invisible amongst black women, for whom lightness of skin is a much more important predictor of socioeconomic prospects...

...occurs between families—that is, it's determined by who your parents were...

...The big loser in this lottery is the next-to-last child, who misses out on being the charming "baby of the family" but still has to deal with the tribulations of a chaotic household...

...Much of what he claims to have learned about infra-familial inequality comes from unstructured interviews, but the book should probably come with a large SAMPLE BIAS WARNING sticker on the front cover, since he and his team chose interviewees by working outward from friends and acquaintances...

...Often he relates stories of different life paths taken by siblings who have no "apparent" difference, or no difference apparent to them, in raw cognitive ability...

...Yet, as the Roman poet said, you may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she always rushes back in...

...But what about the other 75 percent...

...HE TITLE MAKE YOU THINK that Conley is Tpitching a simple thesis about birth-order after the fashion of MIT's Frank Sulloway (of Born to Rebel fame), who has framed all human history as a struggle between conservative firstborns and experimental, order-challenging laterborns...

...By the time you're done reading Barresi's resume, you might wonder just how reliable a source he is...

...Well, if a scientist is determined to perceive no effect, that's what he'll see...

...There's nothing illegal about thumbnail-ish, slightly frayed science, especially in a vacuum of information...

...Hollywood, Interrupted does include some interesting new vignettes, of which the most entertaining is the tale of some C-list celebs involved in a scam to sell frying pans...

...In other words, if Barresi's story is true, it makes Jackson look like an innocent victim...

...S A TREASURY OF FAMILY FABLES, The Pecking Order would be hard to beat...

...Tough question...

...This seems a bit like throwing out two babies and keeping the bathwater...

...They tell us there are rumors that he plagiarized Keeping the Faith as well...

...the problem gets worse later on, when he's described doing something that sure sounds like suborning perjury...

...That Hollywood is Babylon...

...The last child is often a relatively successful, stable "star," enjoying the benefits of a large support network and the parents' experience with previous kids...

...It opens with a long, purple stream of prose about their source: a detective cum gay porn actor named Paul Barresi, most famous for recanting his claims to have carried on a homosexual affair with John Travolta...

...That it's OK to obsess about famous people if you say you're criticizing them...

...L*1 All in the Family The Pecking Order Which Siblings Succeed and Why by Dalton Conley (Pantheon, 320 pages, $24) Reviewed by Colby Cosh EW YORK UNIVERSITY SOCIOLOGIST Dalton Conley, author of The Pecking Order, seems like my kinda guy—a sympathetic humanist with abroad geeky, mathematical streak...

...But while only-children can feel isolated, and later may feel nostalgia for the "missing" siblings other people had, they enjoy a marked head-start by many sociological criteria...

...He says he didn't plagiarize it...

...Conley seems to leave the barn door open when he talks about the income-volatilizing effects of homosexuality (it can be either very bad or very good, socioeconomically), which he acknowledges to have a possible genetic origin...

...They call him...

...It's a gossip book, people...

...Let's have a little perspective...

...As he observes, larger studies are less likely to confirm these effects, and a simple birth-order number can be deceptive...

...Maybe, just maybe, he is a smarmy blackmailer...

...Infra-familial differences have been studied less well than the others, no doubt, mostly because they resist study so many ways...

...Conley points out that the income-juggling effects of intelligence are diminished amongst the upper classes, but since they are sohighly heritable and well attested in the literature—and since they overlap onto both extra-familial and infra-familial differences—I cannot think it will do to yank them off the table...

...You can extract hard variables like family size and birth order from longitudinal studies of families, but what you gain from relying on the unimpeachably scientific, you lose in resolving power...

...He's the sort of person who will tell a compact, affecting story about someone's family struggles and then note parenthetically that the scientific literature "agrees" with her perception of her situation...

...Conley's new book is founded on the observation that about one-quarter of income variability in the U.S...

...Resentment flourishes in all his just-so stories of large clans...

...And so, broadly speaking, do your correspondent's parents, who have 16 siblings between them...

...It creates an environment in which reading and quiet reflection can be difficult...

...In general, he feels that squabbling between nature and nurture ignores the outsized effects of Society-with-a-capital- S, a sort of immense, forgotten uber-nurturer...

...This is, alas, near piffle...

...It's an allure we're probably genetically programmed for...

...Scientifically, I think Conley would admit that this volume is only a first attempt at an answer...

...And its earnestness is a terrible bore: It's always insisting that there's more to the book than gossip, that there's a thesis here, dammit, even if it's hard to say just what that thesis is...

...And then it all kinda peters out...

...But The Pecking Order may set out a useful research agenda, and contains much to fascinate, terrify, and, instruct the prospective parent...

...That celebrities can be crazy...

...Time and again our friend the Selfish Gene is ignored or waved aside, despite quite possibly having something to say...

...As if—with due respect to science—it could reasonably disagree...

...The most irritating thing about the book is the trendy way Conley claims to hover peacefully above "nature/nurture" questions...

...But it's most convincing when it's telling us stuff we already know: that Courtney Love is a bully, that Barbra Streisand is an airhead, that Scientology is creepy, that Hollywood liberals can be sanctimonious hypocrites...

...By Barresi's account, Jackson was unaware of Schaffel's history, and Schaffel was plotting to plant kiddie porn on Jackson's estate in order to blackmail the singer...

...To focus on birth order, he argues, is to overlook the 800-pound gorilla of family dynamics: family size, or to use the jargon, "sibship size"—the number of brothers and sisters you have...

...MAY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 BOOKS IN REVIEW over shares of that quarter...

...Often the older children are impressed into substitute parenting, and the effects are bad more often than they are good...

...Barresi offers his take on the revelation two years ago that Michael Jackson had hired a gay porn director, Marc Schaffel, to helm the video for his song "What More Can I Give...

...At other times the authors seem to realize that the story they're pursuing isn't panning out, but they stick it in the tome anyway...

...In fact, Conley is dismissive of one-size-fits-all birth-order effects on personality...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW end job in contemporary America—and a younger brother who, with no outstanding single talent, drifted fortuitously into computer programming...

...62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 "Sociologists repeatedly find," Conley says, "that kids who grow up in smaller families generally do much better in terms of success than kids from larger families...

...But the oddest thing about the chapter is that Breitbart and Ebner don't seem to recognize the implications of the story their source has told them...

...Sometimes disproportionate amounts of resources are committed to one member of the brood deemed to have special gifts...

...I'll have to remember to send them my review copy of the book...

...Why is this even in the book...

...T HE STRANGEST SEGMENT iS surely the section that promises to shed new light on the "sexual perversities" and "indiscretions unparalleled" of Michael Jackson...

...At times Conley has tried to improvise new tools of study, and he is encouragingly candid about their limitations, even if the candor is half-buried in an appendix...