Amazon.com Review
In recent years, people have begun to examine family dynamics for clues to individual success. Birth order, in particular, has been a favored explanation for the differences between siblings in everything from leadership skills to romantic conquests. Now Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at NYU, reveals that indeed our siblings may affect how our lives turn out, but not in the ways we might think. Conley made an effort not to simplify the very complex familial data collected by both the United States Census, a long-term study conducted by the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago's General Social Survey. What he found was that the differences between siblings outweigh almost every other kind of difference between any two individuals in the United States. Every family has a pecking order independent of birth order, and the differences between siblings are magnified by poverty and disenfranchisement. In these situations, families invest in the sibling most likely to succeed, leading to stark divides, even class differences between family members. Oddly, the choice of successful sibling is made independent of birth order, parental attention, or innate talents, and becomes a tacit agreement among family members. Conley uses a plethora of examples, including Bill and Roger Clinton, to illustrate his findings, and readers will nod knowingly at many of the ubiquitous family behaviors that set siblings up for differing life paths. Ultimately, what The Pecking Order reveals is that there is no single factor that can predict one's success or failure in life, but that complex, multilayered familial dynamics play the biggest part in determining our fate. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
The surprising fact that sibling differences account for three-quarters of all differences between individuals in explaining American economic inequality acts as a challenge for NYU sociology professor Conley. Drawing on economic studies conducted by the U.S. Census, University of Michigan and University of Chicago, and interviewing hundreds of subjects, Conley illuminates provocative findings. Counter to the belief that birth order predicts a child's success and role within a family, he argues that what really matters is family size, parental time and attention, and how much of the family's financial resources are available for the child. Conley concludes from his findings that parents can more easily affect their children's development by their choices of family size and spacing of births than by attempts to move up the economic ladder. He is candid about the limitations of current surveys and discusses the complexities of studying an institution whose modern workings are contingent on slippery factors (e.g., gender, race, class). Despite all he's learned, the staggering number of factors affecting the workings of a family frustrates Conley's desire to come up with hard and fast rules. Yet from what he has found thus far, he can proclaim, "the family is not a haven in a harsh world. It is part and parcel of that world, rat race and all. Inequality, after all, starts at home." Although Conley's academic prose may challenge general readers , graduate students looking for thesis topics will be well served: he has tons of ideas where research could go to get more answers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Conley challenges conventional wisdom and preconceived explanations about individual success by examining divergent success rates within nuclear families, specifically between siblings. Rather than comparing two successful but nonrelated people, he concentrates on comparisons between brothers and sisters who have experienced vastly different rates of achievement. Arguing convincingly that "inequality starts at home" among siblings who share the same parents, the same socioeconomic status, and the same environment, he analyzes the different ways in which social mores and societal pressures affect various members of the same family, predetermining who will have the greater chance for personal and professional fulfillment. All but abandoning the birth-order theories that have dominated sibling studies and the personality-based explanations for success and failure, he offers a revolutionary new theory--grounded in facts and statistics--detailing the complexities of both the familial and the societal sorting processes. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Lucid and provocative. . . . It will make you think twice about how you became what you are.” —The Washington Post Book World
"Don't get too attached to tidy assumptions, such as ‘firstborns succeed’ and ‘elite colleges make the difference.’ The Pecking Order is bound to shatter them.” —Detroit Free Press
“Conley turns conventional wisdom on its head. . . . Astonishing.” —The New York Times
“A profound, controversial and blessedly easy-to-read book that ought to be required reading for armchair experts about families--their own families, and others about whom they gossip.” —The Oregonian
"Intriguing and provocative." —Howard Gardner, The Boston Globe
"[Conley] offers a revolutionary new theory -- grounded in facts and statistics -- detailing the complexities of both the familial and the societal sorting process." —Booklist
“Families can be tough. Now there’s statistical proof.” —O Magazine
“Fascinating…The Pecking Order provides a revealing and well-researched insight into modern American society.” —Tulsa World
“Authoritative yet lively...[Conley] chooses stories that get complicated, but he does not compromise the nuances of the statistical research. He keeps his prose simple…The Pecking Order brings an important but technical branch of social science to a new readership.” —Michael Hout, Contexts
“An interesting and eminently readable combination of overall trends and individual family histories.” —The Providence Journal-Bulletin
“From the first page, this book is engaging because you cannot help but think of your own family predicament.” —The Seattle Times
“A fun read with a serious intent…Conley satisfies our thirst for knowing the private lives of the rich and famous while also shedding light on the family lives of anonymous Americans.” —Stanley Aronowitz, The Nation
“The Pecking Order is not a conventional parenting book, but it stands as a daunting reminder of the significant roles both parents and sibling play in determining a child’s success in the world.” —National Post (Canada)
"Reveals a much more fascinatingly shaded world than that of those who choose either nature or nurture." -Kirkus Reviews
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
We want to think of the family as a haven, a sheltered port from the maelstrom of social forces that rip through our lives. Within the family, we like to think, everyone starts out on equal footing. And yet we see around us evidence that siblings all too often diverge widely in social status, wealth, and education. We think these are aberrant cases?the president and the drug addict, the professor and the convict. Surely in most families, in our families, all children will succeed equally, and when they don?t, we turn to one-dimensional answers to explain the discrepancy?birth order, for instance, or gender.
In this groundbreaking book, Dalton Conley shows us that inequality in families is not the exception but the norm. More than half of all income inequality in this country occurs not between families but within families. Children who grow up in the same house can?and frequently do?wind up on opposite sides of the class divide. In fact, the family itself is where much inequality is fostered and developed. In each family, there exists a pecking order among siblings, a status hierarchy. This pecking order is not necessarily determined by the natural abilities of each individual, and not even by the intentions or will of the parents. It is determined by the larger social forces that envelop the family: gender expectations, the economic cost of education, divorce, early loss of a parent, geographic mobility, religious and sexual orientation, trauma, and even arbitrary factors such as luck and accidents. Conley explores each of these topics, giving us a richly nuanced understanding that transforms the way we should look at the family as an institution of care, support, and comfort.
Drawing from the U.S. Census, from the General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago over the last thirty years, and from a landmark study that was launched in 1968 by the University of Michigan and that has been following five thousand families, Conley has irrefutable empirical evidence backing up his assertions. Enriched by countless anecdotes and stories garnered through years of interviews, this is a book that will forever alter our idea of family.
About the Author
Dalton Conley is director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research and professor of sociology and public policy at New York University. He is also adjunct professor of community medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon, among other publications. His previous books include Honky and Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America. Conley lives in New York City.
From The Washington Post
Dalton Conley begins this provocative study of the ways in which familial pecking orders affect the adult lives of siblings with a quick look at the brothers, or half-brothers, Clinton. The environment in which they grew up was essentially the same -- a family of modest means presided over by a gregarious mother and an abusive father -- but the two boys took dramatically different courses. Bill did well in college and went into Arkansas and then national politics with, as the world well knows, spectacular success. Roger, by contrast, went to prison for cocaine dealing and, after his release, continued a pattern of drifting from pillar to post.
The explanation, Conley argues, is to be found neither in genetic differences nor in birth order but in the way the family's limited financial resources affected each of them. Virginia Clinton "put all her eggs -- all her hopes and dreams -- in Bill's basket," with little left to give Roger a similar boost. Indeed, Conley argues, "Bill's success seemed to come at the expense of Roger's -- particularly when it led Roger to a false sense of invincibility" that convinced him that being the brother of the governor and then the president made him "untouchable."
Maybe so, maybe not. These are matters in which speculation carries at least as much weight as sociological and psychological data. But throughout The Pecking Order Conley makes a convincing argument that "in explaining economic inequality in America, sibling differences represent about three-quarters of all the differences between individuals." Statistics indicate that "the basic phenomenon of sibling differences in success that the Clintons represent is not all that unusual." Conley writes:
"What do sibling disparities . . . indicate? They imply an American landscape where class identity is ever changing and not necessarily shared between brothers and sisters. Taken as a whole, the above statistics present a starkly darker portrait of American family life than we are used to. We want to think that the home is a haven in a heartless world. The truth is that inequality starts at home. These statistics also pose problems for those concerned with what seems to be a marked erosion of the idealized nuclear family. In fact, they hint at a trade-off between opportunity and stable, cohesive families."
Or, to put it another way, happy families are not all alike: Whatever picture it presents to the outside world, a family is "a tangled web," a "complex network of affiliations stewing over with the potential for politics and intrigue" in which inequality among siblings is often the rule, with lasting repercussions for all. Children who grow up in the same family may "end up in radically different positions in life." Why? What's going on here?
A lot, Conley argues, some of it the result of deliberately inconsistent treatment of and/or expectations for the children within a family, some the result of luck, accident, sheer randomness, some a combination of all of the above. There's "an old saying that a gene for aggressiveness might land you the job of CEO if you are born to wealth and privilege, but gets you jail time if you are born in the ghetto." Or, as Conley says, "The random lottery of birth seems to have made all the difference." The genetic element is there, to be sure, but the circumstances in which a child is reared may be the controlling element in how it develops. By the same token, birth order can be a factor, too, but the ways in which each family treats its individual children often carry greater weight than their position in the family's birth hierarchy.
To his credit Conley is quick to acknowledge that these are questions for which there are no easy answers: "Anyone who tells you that they [sic] are going to explain your personality, your marriage, your career or anything else about you with one factor -- gender, birth order, income or astrological sign -- might as well be selling you a bottle of snake oil. There are as many explanations for particular family pecking orders as there are families." The point, though, is that pecking orders do exist, and that it is frequently possible to determine both how they were created and what effects they have.
Thus, for example, Conley argues that family size matters, and that the larger the family, the greater the possibility that some children within it will have greater advantages (i.e., higher places in the pecking order) than others. The simple explanation is that "parental time, attention, and money are somewhat fixed pies and each additional slice means less for everybody." Within a large family, birth order is likely to matter more than in a small one, because children in the middle (a) rarely if ever get only-child parental attention, as first- and last-born often do and (b) get smaller shares of the overall family pie than do first- and last-born.
Obviously people who grew up in large, happy families -- the Gilbreths of Cheaper by the Dozen, for example -- will rush to defend them on any number of perfectly reasonable grounds. By marriage my own family is connected to another family with a dozen children, all of whom seem to have thrived and to have been spared painful sibling rivalries. But no doubt it helped that the family was relatively prosperous though hardly rich (the children were winners in that "random lottery of birth") and that both parents seem to have gone out of the way to divide their attention and resources as equally as possible among all the children.
Which is simply to say that in the matters Conley raises, no rules are hard and fast, but a number of points are sufficiently valid to provide useful guideposts. One is that how a child is viewed within a family -- the smart kid, the dumb kid, the jock, the lazybones -- has lasting effects whether the characterization is accurate or not. This is "what sociologists call a 'master status,' a perceived characteristic that colors the way everything else about a person is viewed. It becomes the first thing that someone thinks of when that person comes to mind." It also can become the way that person thinks of him- or herself, with long-term consequences that can be enriching or disabling.
Another guidepost is that "small differences can generate large ripples"; one son plays grade-school football and succeeds, another tries and fails, and the incredibly complex structure of accomplishment and resentment plays itself out over two lifetimes. A related one is that events occurring randomly can have lasting and traumatic (or beneficial) effects. Conley tells the story of a girl who was gang-raped at age 15, a personal calamity that knocked her "off the track of straight-laced honor student." Her parents asked her not to tell her older sister, to whom she was close, because "they did not want both their kids knocked off course by this tragedy," with the predictable result "that her sister, Denise, went off to college with no major trauma, and Missy was left to deal with the rape's aftermath on her own, without any sibling support."
For whatever reason, these parents created a pecking order based not on birth order but on their own expectations for the girls' future. The rape was bad enough, but the parents could have diminished its long-term effects by acting more sensitively -- less selfishly, if you will -- than they did. Another girl, Meredith, who suffered brain damage in a fall, received strong support from her mother -- to whom she had not previously been close -- and a hair stylist who urged her to enter a beauty contest. She did, and won, and was set on a course that led to a fruitful, happy life. By contrast her sister resented their mother's focus on Meredith, and as married adults the two remain distant, both physically and emotionally, from each other.
Randomness isn't all by any means, but it's a lot. Nor is it entirely random. The "outside influences" that can alter lives "are not totally haphazard." Girls "are much more likely than boys to get raped or sexually abused," which is to say that being a girl increases the chances that a "random" act will occur to you and forever alter your life. Ditto if you are a young black male, because "given the structure of American society, black teenage boys are more likely than white teenage boys to get into trouble with the law," with unforeseeable but probably unfortunate consequences.
This only begins to touch on Conley's argument. The effects of divorce, working mothers, changes in families' income and social position -- these and many other matters come under Conley's microscope. Though at times he comes up a bit short in his avowed desire to avoid writing sociologese, on the whole the book is lucid and provocative. Certainly it will make you think twice about how you became what you are, and if you're a parent it will -- or should -- make you think hard about the pecking order you've created and its potential influence on your children's lives.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
INEQUALITY STARTS AT HOME
An Introduction to the Pecking Order
Let me start with a story.
Once upon a time a future president was born. William Jefferson Blythe IV entered the world one month premature but at a healthy six pounds and eight ounces. At twenty-three, his mother, Virginia, was young by today's standards, but perhaps a touch old for Arkansas in the 1940s. She was a widow, so times were tight during Bill's early years. In fact, times would be tough during all of Bill's childhood. Nonetheless, he seemed destined for great things. According to family lore, in second grade Bill's teacher "predicted that he would be President someday."[1]
His mother eventually married Roger Clinton, but that didn't make life any easier for Bill. Roger was a bitterly jealous alcoholic who often became physically abusive to his wife. Bill cites the day that he stood up to his stepfather as the most important marker in his transition to adulthood and perhaps in his entire life. In 1962, when Bill was sixteen, Virginia finally divorced Roger, but by then there was another Roger Clinton in the family, Bill's younger half brother.
Though Bill despised his stepfather, he still went to the Garland County courthouse and changed his last name to Clinton after his mother's divorce from the man--not for the old man's sake, but so that he would have the same last name as the younger brother he cherished. Though they were separated by ten years, were only half siblings, and ran in very different circles, the brothers were close. The younger Roger probably hated his father more than Bill did, but he nonetheless started to manifest many of the same traits as he came of age. He was a fabulous salesman: at age thirteen, he sold twice as many magazines as any of his classmates for a school project, winning a Polaroid camera and a turkey for his superior effort. He also had an affinity for substance abuse: by eighteen, he was heavily into marijuana. During Bill's first (unsuccessful) congressional campaign in 1974, Roger spent much of his time stenciling signs while smoking joints in the basement of campaign headquarters.
As Bill's political fortunes rose, Roger's prospects first stagnated and then sank. He tried his hand at a musical career, worked odd jobs, and eventually got into dealing drugs. And it was not just pot; in 1984, then-governor Bill Clinton was informed that his brother was a cocaine dealer under investigation by the Arkansas state police. The governor did not stand in the way of a sting operation, and Roger was caught on tape boasting how untouchable he was as the brother of the state's chief executive. Then the axe fell. After his arrest, Roger was beside himself in tears, threatening suicide for the shame he had brought upon his family--in particular, his famous brother. Upon hearing this threat Bill shook Roger violently. (He, in truth, felt responsible for his brother's slide.)
The next January, Roger was sentenced to a two-year prison term in a federal corrections facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Bill describes the whole ordeal as the most difficult episode of his life. David Maraniss--the author of First in His Class, the most comprehensive biography of Clinton to date--summarizes the family situation as follows:
How could two brothers be so different: the governor and the coke dealer, the Rhodes scholar and the college dropout, one who tried to read three hundred books in three months and another who at his most addicted snorted cocaine sixteen times a day, one who could spend hours explaining economic theories and another whose economic interests centered on getting a new Porsche? In the case of the Clinton brothers, the contrasts become more understandable when considered within the context of their family history and environment. They grew up in a town of contrast and hypocrisy, in a family of duality and conflict. Bill and Roger were not so much opposites as two sides of the same coin.[2]
If asked to explain why Bill succeeded where Roger failed, most people will immediately point to genetic differences. After all, they were only half siblings to begin with. Others will pin it on birth order, claiming that firstborns are more driven and successful. But both of these accounts rely on individual explanations--ones particular to the unique biology or psychology of Bill and Roger--and both are incomplete. Was Bill more favored and more driven because he was a firstborn? My research shows that in families with two kids, birth order does not really matter that much. In fact, just under one-fourth of U.S. presidents were firstborns--about what we would expect from chance. The fact is that birth position only comes into play in larger families. But what about genes: was Bill simply luckier in the family gene pool? That may be so, but it still does not explain why sibling disparities are much more common in poor families and broken homes than they are in rich, intact families. In fact, when families have limited resources, the success of one sibling often generates a negative backlash among the others.
Sure, if one kid is born a mathematical genius and the other with no talents whatsoever, their respective dice may be cast at birth. But for most of us, how genes matter depends on the social circumstances around us. A child in one family may be born with innate athletic talent that is never nurtured because the parents in that family value reading ability over all else. Yet in another family, the fit between the individual talents of a particular child--say spatial reasoning--and the values of the parents may be perfect, and those abilities are realized. Finally, what kind of rewards talent brings depends entirely on the socioeconomic structure of the time. Fifty years ago, musical talent might have led to a decent living. Today--in an economy that rewards the most popular musicians handsomely at the expense of everyone else--innate musical ability is more often a route to financial struggle.
In Bill Clinton's case, he obviously had good genes--which contributed to his sharp mind, quick wit, tall stature, and verbal charisma--but there was not much advantage to being the firstborn. What really made a difference in his life was the good fit between his particular talents, the aspirations of those around him, and the political opportunities in a small state like Arkansas. This good fit combined with his family's lack of economic resources to generate an enormous sibling difference in success. However, had Virginia had money, she might not have had to put all her eggs--all her hopes and dreams--in Bill's basket. She might have been able to actively compensate for Bill's success by giving Roger extra financial and nonfinancial support--sending him, for example, to an elite private school when he started to veer off track. Instead, Bill's success seemed to come at the expense of Roger's--particularly when it led Roger to a false sense of invincibility.
On the surface, it may seem that the case of the Clintons is atypical. And, of course, a pair of brothers who are, respectively, the president and an ex-con is a bit extreme. But the basic phenomenon of sibling differences in success that the Clintons represent is not all that unusual. In fact, in explaining economic inequality in America, sibling differences represent about three-quarters of all the differences between individuals. Put another way, only one-quarter of all income inequality is between families. The remaining 75 percent is within families.[3] Sibling differences in accumulated wealth (i.e., net worth) are even greater, reaching 90-plus percent.[4] What this means is that if we lined everyone in America up in rank order of how much money they have--from the poorest homeless person to Bill Gates himself--and tried to predict where any particular individual might fall on that long line, then knowing about what family they came from would narrow down our uncertainty by about 25 percent (in the case of income). In other words, the dice are weighted by which family you come from, but you and your siblings still have to roll them. For example, if you come from a family that ranks in the bottom 5 percent of the income hierarchy, then you have a 40 percent chance of finding yourself in the lowest 10 percent, a 21 percent chance of making it to somewhere between the 30th and 70th percentile, and only a one in a thousand chance of making it to the top 10 percent. If you come from the richest 5 percent of families in America, then your odds are flipped. And if you start at the dead middle of the American income ladder, then you are about 63 percent likely to end up somewhere in that 30th- to 70th-percentile range, with a 4 percent chance of ending up either in the top or the bottom 10 percent.[5] A similar pattern holds for educational differences. For example, if you attended college there is almost a 50 percent chance that one of your siblings did not (and vice versa).[6]
What do sibling disparities as large as these indicate? They imply an American landscape where class identity is ever changing and not necessarily shared between brothers and sisters. Taken as a whole, the above statistics present a starkly darker portrait of American family life than we are used to. We want to think that the home is a haven in a heartless world. The truth is that inequality starts at home. These statistics also pose problems for those concerned with what seems to be a marked erosion of the idealized nuclear family. In fact, they hint at a trade-off between economic opportunity and stable, cohesive families.
While it may be surprising to realize how common sibling inequality is on the whole, my analysis of national data shows that Americans are quite aware of sibling disparities within their own families. For instance, when given a choice of fourteen categories of kin ranging from parents to grandparents to spouses to uncles, a whopping 34 percent of respondents claimed that a sibling was their most economically successful relative. When the question is flipped, 46 percent of respondents report a sibling being thei...
