November 17, 2007
Vote on Grand Socialist Plan Stirs Passions in Venezuela

By SIMON ROMERO
CARACAS, Venezuela, Nov. 16 — In two weeks, Venezuela seems likely to start an extraordinary experiment in centralized, oil-fueled socialism. By law, the workday would be cut to six hours. Street vendors, homemakers and maids would have state-mandated pensions. And President Hugo Chávez would have significantly enhanced powers and be eligible for re-election for the rest of his life.

The wide-ranging revision of the constitution, which is expected to be approved by referendum on Dec. 2, is both bolstering Mr. Chávez’s popularity here among people who will benefit and stirring contempt from economists who declare it demagogy. Signaling new instability here, dissent is also emerging among his former lieutenants, some of whom say the president is carrying out a populist coup.

“There is a perverse subversion of our existing Constitution under way,” said Gen. Raúl Isaías Baduel, a retired defense minister and former confidant of Mr. Chávez who broke with him in a stunning defection this month to the political opposition. “This is not a reform,” General Baduel said in an interview here. “I categorize it as a coup d’état.”

Chávez loyalists already control the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, almost every state government, the entire federal bureaucracy and newly nationalized companies in the telephone, electricity and oil industries. Soon they could control even more.

But this is an upheaval that would be carried out with the approval of the voters. While polls in Venezuela are often tainted by partisanship, they suggest the referendum could be Mr. Chávez’s closest electoral test since his presidency began in 1999, but one he is still likely to win.

“We are witnessing a seizure and redirection of power through legitimate means,” said Alberto Barrera Tyszka, co-author of a best-selling biography of Mr. Chávez. “This is not a dictatorship but something more complex: the tyranny of popularity.”

One of the package of 69 amendments to the 1999 constitution would allow Mr. Chávez to create new administrative regions, governed by vice presidents chosen by him. Critics say the reforms would also shift funds from states and cities, where a handful of elected officials still oppose him, to communal councils, new local governing entities that are predominantly pro-Chávez.

Interviews this week on the streets here and in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city, offer a window into the strength of Mr. Chávez’s followers and the challenges of his critics. His supporters, many of whom are public servants in a bureaucracy that has recently ballooned in size, have flooded poor districts to campaign for the overhaul.

“The comandante should have more power because he is the force behind our revolution,” said Egda Vilchez, 51, a pro-Chávez activist, as she campaigned in favor of the new charter this week at a busy intersection in Cacique Mara, an area of slums in eastern Maracaibo.

Such statements might sound dogmatic, but they are voiced with a fervor in organized campaigning that is unmatched in richer areas of Venezuela’s largest cities, where much of the opposition to Mr. Chávez lies.

Aside from a nascent student movement which has held protests of increasing defiance in recent weeks, the middle and upper classes seem largely resigned about the outcome of a referendum that is less about specific issues than Mr. Chávez’s resilient support among the poor.

In comments after a summit of Latin American leaders this month in Chile, Mr. Chávez laid out his project in simple language. “Capitalist Venezuela is entering its grave,” he said, “and socialist Venezuela is being born.” Indeed, socialist imagery is pervasive throughout this country, from the red shirts worn by Mr. Chávez and his followers to the chant of “Fatherland, socialism or death!” repeated at the end of his rallies.

But walking into a grocery store here offers a different view of the changes washing over Venezuela. Combined with price controls that keep farmers from profitably producing some basic foods, climbing incomes of the poorest Venezuelans have stripped supermarket aisles bare of items like milk and eggs. Meanwhile, foreign exchange controls create bottlenecks for importers seeking to meet rising demand for many products.

Such imbalances plague oil economies elsewhere, with oil revenues often making it cheaper to import goods than produce them at home. But the system Mr. Chávez is creating is perhaps unique: a hybrid of state-supported enterprises and no-holds-barred capitalism in which 500,000 automobiles are expected to be sold this year.

Lacking here, for instance, is the authoritarianism one might expect in a country where billboards promoting Mr. Chávez have proliferated in the last year.

Looming above the Centro San Ignacio, this city’s choicest shopping mall, is one of the president hugging a child while he explains the “motors” of his revolution. Others show him kissing old women, decorating graduates of the military university and embracing an ally, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Beneath these images, chaos persists on the street level, reflecting a state flush with oil money but weak when facing systemic problems like violent crime. The country had 9,568 homicides in the first nine months of this year, a 9 percent increase from the same period last year.

Private companies here, meanwhile, have the dilemma of profiting from a growing economy while dreading what is to come, prompting an accelerating capital flight that has caused the currency, the bolívar, to plunge in value against the dollar since Mr. Chávez announced the constitutional overhaul in August.

Sparse details as to how Mr. Chávez’s government would implement measures a like a six-hour workday or finance a new social security system have done little for economic confidence, with Fedecámaras, the country’s main business association, urging voters to oppose the new charter “by all legal means.”

The proposals have also revealed sharp divisions among the president’s own supporters, symbolized by the sharp criticism from General Baduel, who had helped reinstall Mr. Chávez in power after a brief coup in 2002.

Marisabel Rodríguez, the president’s ex-wife and former first lady, came out against the new charter this week, saying it would lead to “absolute concentration of power.” And previously pro-Chávez governors like Ramón Martínez of Sucre State, sensing their power could be curtailed, have begun criticizing the measures.

Under the project, term limits would be abolished only for the president, not for governors or mayors. Another item raises the threshold for collecting signatures to hold a vote to recall the president, effectively shielding him from one option voters have to challenge his power under the existing Constitution of 1999.

Other measures in the project are considered progressive by both critics of Mr. Chávez and his political base, which includes leftist military officials, academics, civil servants and a large portion of the urban and rural poor.

The voting age in this demographically young country, for instance, would be lowered to 16 from 18. Discrimination based on sexual orientation would also be prohibited. Many of the items are vaguely worded, however, like one giving the president the power to create “communal cities.”

“Clearly there are positive aspects to the reform, but the government has committed a political error by trying to rush it to voters without enough discussion,” said Edgardo Lander, a sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who is generally sympathetic to Mr. Chávez. “The opposition can argue this is illegitimate if it is approved by a low margin.”

Mr. Chávez, who recently hinted at staying in power until 2031, might also be preparing for resistance here if oil revenues prove insufficient to finance his ambitions. One of the reforms allows him to declare states of emergency during which he can shut down television stations and newspapers.

“Chávez wants to liquidate challenges to his rule to enable him to govern Venezuela for the rest of his life,” Manuel Rosales, governor of Zulia State and the main challenger to Mr. Chávez in presidential elections last year, said in an interview at his office in Maracaibo.

Auctioning Jerusalem Foretells Israeli PM's Demise

by Jonathan Schanzer and Asaf Romirowsky
American Thinker
November 13, 2007
http://www.meforum.org/article/1802

"Peace is achieved through concessions. We all know that," said embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to crowd of businessmen last week, implying that parts of Jerusalem could be offered to the Palestinians in exchange for peace.

This is not the first time Olmert indicated that he was willing to split up Israel's capital. Last month, he publicly pondered whether it was really "necessary to also add the Shuafat refugee camp, Sawakra, Walaje and other villages and define them as part of Jerusalem."

Drawing from the history of other desperate Israeli prime ministers who have put Israel up on the auction block, Olmert's time in office is probably near its end.

The prime minister's recent statements can be seen only as a last gasp effort to revive his flatlining premiership. After demonstrating an utter lack of leadership during Israel's confrontation with Hizbullah last summer in Lebanon, few Israelis have any confidence in their prime minister. Indeed, he has miserably low approval ratings (as low as 2% in recent polls), with political challengers circling for the right moment to pounce.

Olmert is now chasing peace with the Palestinians at all costs, in a desperate attempt to secure his place in world history, knowing full well that future Israeli history books will not be kind. This fits a sad but familiar trend of other sputtering Israeli prime ministers in recent history.

Take Israel's current Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Under pressure from the Clinton administration during the July 2000 Camp David talks, he became the first Israeli Prime Minister to officially consider re-dividing Jerusalem. Despite the fact that this infuriated a majority of the Israeli public, as demonstrated in popularity polls, the embattled Barak forged ahead. When the talks ultimately failed, thanks to Yasir Arafat's intransigence, the Palestinians launched the al-Aqsa intifada. Barak was blamed for the violence, leading to an even steeper drop in his popularity. Ariel Sharon went on to win the 2001 elections by a landslide 63 percent.

Barak's plummeting popularity even before the intifada was inextricably linked to the former Israeli commando's willingness to violate Israel's longstanding red lines: no division of Jerusalem, no return to the 1949 borders, no return of Arab refugees, and no foreign army west of the Jordan River. But, faced with a legacy of failure, Barak clung to the notion that a peace deal ceding parts of Jerusalem might ultimately secure his place in history. In the end, it only ensured his defeat.

One can also argue that Shimon Peres, who became prime Minister by default in 1995 after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, also ensured his own demise by dangling Jerusalem as a concession to the Palestinians. An architect of the Oslo process, Peres pushed tenaciously forward toward peace, even when Israel was bloodied by a brutal campaign of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad suicide bombings. Despite the fact that the PA never reigned in Hamas, Peres never stopped pushing for peace. And he never took the question of Jerusalem off the table. Instead, he allowed the Palestinians to hold elections in Jerusalem in 1996, which was largely viewed as a gesture of possible future concessions. Thus, when Benjamin Netanyahu challenged Peres in the next election, he hammered Peres' blind commitment to a failing peace process, and charged that Peres would even surrender control of Jerusalem. This, alone, may have cost Peres the election.

When Olmert, Barak, and Peres raised the specter of Jerusalem, their political shelf lives had all but expired. Indeed, when Israeli politicians discuss the fate of Jerusalem to please the U.S. State Department or Palestinian negotiators, they are indicating to the Israeli public that they have given up on popular support. Instead, they make a last ditch effort to secure their own place in history.

Olmert's recent talk of dividing Jerusalem is a sign that new Israeli elections are almost assuredly around the corner. Refusing to go quietly, he is endangering the unity of Israel's capital just as his moment in history comes to an end.

Jonathan Schanzer is director of policy at the Jewish Policy Center, and editor of inFocus Quarterly. Asaf Romirowsky is an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum and Manager of Israel & Middle East Affairs for the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

THE SHIA ANTI-IRAN ALLIANCE
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Friday, 16 November 2007

TTPers have known for many moons now that the American military is winning a tremendous victory in Iraq. This week, Tony Blankley and Jack Kelly provide updates in Declaring Victory and Declaring Defeat.

The media is finally and begrudgingly acknowledging the reality of victory. So far, however, the focus has been entirely on the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Yet this has been a two-front war, a war to terrorize and destabilize Iraq waged not just by AQI, but by Iran.

Now we learn that not only is terrorist violence vanishing in Sunni regions of AQI focus, but in Shia regions of Iranian focus. AP is reporting that Basra violence is down 90%.

America's victory in Iraq means that both Al Qaeda and Iran have been defeated... simultaneously.

Now here's a question to consider: Was this George Bush's goal all along?

He has always maintained that the War in Iraq was being conducted "to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here." "Them" seems now to mean both varieties of Moslem terrorists: Sunni Al Qaeda-types and Shia Iranian-types.

GW identified Iraq as the one place both of them could be taken down at the same time. Iraq as a two-fer! Yes, the man can be scary-smart. With painful obviousness, not all the time. But when he is, he can hit a geopolitical ten-strike.

Let's not go there, though. Let's focus instead on the consequences of defeat in Iraq for Iran. They are very grave. One of the gravest examples is the emerging Arab Shia Anti-Iran Alliance.

First the background check. According to Islamic mythology, the Sunni-Shia split occurred at the very inception, right after Mohammed's death in 632. One faction, followers of Mohammed's uncle and El Segundo, Abu Bakr, called themselves Ahl-as-Sunnah, people of the path or example of Mohammed.

Another faction followed Mohammed's son-in-law, Ali, married to his daughter Fatima (somehow, for all his many wives, Mohammed managed to have no sons and only one daughter), calling themselves Shi'at Ali, the party of Ali.

When Ali was assassinated in 661, the Shia leadership fell upon Ali and Fatima's son Hussein, the first male descendent of Mohammed. In the legendary Battle of Karbala in 680 between the Sunnis and Shias, the latter were disastrously defeated and Hussein killed.

Thus the two holy cities for Shias, their Meccas, are Najaf where Ali is buried in a golden tomb, and Karbala, the battle site and where Hussein is buried in a golden-domed mausoleum. Both are in present-day Iraq. Arab Iraq. The Sunni-Shia factional split is an Arab phenomenon.

Yet we associate Shias with Persia, with Iran, with mad-dog Ayatollahs like Khomeini. That's because 500 years ago, the founder of the Safayed Dynasty in Persia, Shah Ismail I (1487-1524) hijacked Shi'ism to be a state religion as a unifying force in his successful effort to glue Persia back together from pieces seized by it from the Sunni Ottoman Turks and Sunni Uzbek Khans.

Ever since Ismail, Shi'ism has been a despised Persian heresy, with Sunni Arabs hating Shia Persians, and hating Shia Arabs who insisted on sticking with their version of Islam.

But the fact is there are a lot of Shia Arabs. 16 million in Iraq alone, over 60% of the population. 4 million right across the border, the Ahwazi Arabs of Iran. Millions more in Kuwait, Bahrain, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries. Their religious leaders or Ayatollahs are seizing the opportunity Iran's defeat in Iraq is giving them to form an Anti-Iran Alliance.

It doesn't have that title, so to be more precise it's an alliance against the radical terrorist interpretation of Shi'ism by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors who rule Iran today. For these Arab Ayatollahs assert that the Khomeinist version of Shi'ism is the total antithesis of the most basic Shia beliefs.

Among the most basic is the traditional Shia belief that a theocracy is heresy, literally against the will of Allah. Shias believe in an Islamic Messiah, the Hidden Imam who will return someday - and only upon his return will there be an Islamic rule of humanity.

When Khomeini established a theocratic tyranny in the name of Shia Islam, it horrified many Shia leaders - among them Khomeini's mentor and primary Islamic tutor, the Grand Ayatollah Taher al-Khaqani. When Khaqani went to see his former student to protest the utter heresy and immorality of Khomeini's oppression, Khomeini ordered him thrown into prison where he had him murdered.

Taher al-Khaqani was an Ahwazi Arab. It is his son, Qazem al-Khaqani, who is spearheading the Shia Arab Anti-Iran Alliance.
Again, it's not an attack on Persia/Iran or on Persians - but rather, an effort to rescue Shi'ism from its captors now ruling in Tehran.

What Qazem al-Khaqani emphasizes is the traditional Shia belief in the separation of religion and politics, of mosque and state. Thus, he argues, the current government in Iran is un-Islamic. Khaqani has launched a direct Shia assault on the Islamic legitimacy of the Mullacracy in Iran.

He forcefully argues for democracy and a secular government as the best way to safeguard freedom of religion - and just as forcefully denounces Jihadism, suicide bombing or any other form of terrorism, and any imposition of "Sharia" religious law upon people. He did so, for example, in a speech at the British House of Commons in London.

His message is resonating with Shia Arabs not just in Iran and Iraq, but in the Gulf States and throughout the Arab world. With help from wealthy Shia in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, there may soon be a Shia Arab satellite television station in London broadcasting into Iran.

Khaqani's message and its resonance could be the Mullacracy's death knell - for what provides the gigantic megaphone is the emerging Shia democracy in Iraq. The Maliki government in Baghdad achieving stability and legitimacy terrifies Tehran - and it is doing so where it frightens Tehran the most: in the Arab world.

Arabs - moderate anti-radical Shia Arabs - are about to reclaim Shi'ism away from the mad-dog mullahs of Iran. The collapse of the regime's Islamic rationale and legitimacy could be the precursor to the implosion of the regime itself.

Regime change from within is the best outcome for Iran. Shia Arabs may help precipitate it

November 16, 2007
Zarqa Journal
Jordan’s Islamists Seek Offices Their Allies Scorn

By THANASSIS CAMBANIS
ZARQA, Jordan — This crammed slum of four-story concrete housing blocs has given Jordan some of its biggest headaches: it is a stronghold of the opposition Islamic Action Front and the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who rose from here to the helm of the Iraqi insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Jordan’s political Islamists wield their most concentrated power here in this industrial city of 834,000 just a quarter-hour’s drive from the capital, Amman.

The Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing, commands almost unanimous support among those in this city who bother to vote in Jordan’s parliamentary elections, widely regarded by Islamists as rigged in the secular government’s favor.

Political Islamists in Jordan are engaged in a delicate balancing act — one that dogs most Islamist parties in the region that choose to take part in secular political systems. That is evident on the campaign trail here as candidates try to inspire their electoral base while attacking as useless the very political system that they have joined.

Hayat Massimi, a 45-year-old pharmacist and parliamentary incumbent from the Islamic Action Front, has been crisscrossing Zarqa’s cramped neighborhoods, making campaign pitches in private homes and mosques and at tent rallies.

With a trio of aides Ms. Massimi rushes from event to event, fielding passionate and often angry questions from voters who share her religious convictions but question whether committed Islamists should sully themselves by getting involved in politics. If Islam is the solution as the party’s slogan proclaims, and the political system is corrupt, some religious voters wonder why the Islamist bloc should take part in elections at all.

“There’s going to be a Parliament anyway, and if you don’t have anyone representing you the Parliament will do nothing but get on your nerves,” Ms. Massimi said in a heated appeal to about two women at a home here in Zarqa less than two weeks before the Nov. 20 election. “Anyone who tells you they will keep prices down is lying, because Parliament has no power to stop inflation.”

She faced a tough crowd. The veiled women sipped Pepsis and a syrupy sweet desert made of shredded wheat and cheese, but they were anything but demure. What, they wanted to know, could the Islamic Action Front do in Parliament to affect the issues affecting them — rising prices for flour and diesel fuel, stagnant salaries, spiking inflation and rampant unemployment?

“You can’t provide us any services,” said Asmaa Said al-Assi, 38. “Why should I vote for you?”

“The Parliament doesn’t give you services; it gives you laws,” Ms. Massimi said.

Ms. Assi was not impressed “The point is to change the laws!” she said.

In another angry exchange about public corruption, Ms. Massimi chided the voters for their own role in promoting graft and nepotism. “You are responsible, too, when you come and ask your legislator to hire your relatives,” she said.

The Islamist candidates decided to run even though their own Islamic Action Front leadership wanted to boycott the election, contending that the government rigged elections to minimize the Islamist representation.

In the current Parliament, the Islamic bloc holds 17 of 110 seats and is expected to retain about the same share in balloting that the government controls with gerrymandered districts.

Ms. Massimi, a mother of five, is the quintessential Islamic Action Front politician: professional, bilingual, capable of both restrained political speech and impassioned religious discussion. She is a Palestinian refugee who came to Jordan from Nablus in 1967 and won her first term in 2003 for one of the six seats reserved for women. Like the other 22 Islamist bloc candidates, she never directly asks people for their vote, which would be considered immodest.

Above all, the Islamists campaign on an anticorruption platform. Islamist leaders drive simple cars, and refuse to trade their parliamentary position for favors and bribes, the party argues, in a system awash with bribes, kickbacks and other opportunities to get rich quickly and illegally. “We are not bribe-able, and we are not for sale,” Ms. Massimi said.

Unlike secular opposition candidates, the Islamists are outspoken critics of the government. But that frankness had limited impact on the Zarqa voters, who kept pressing Ms. Massimi on the prospects for economic reform.

Militants command deep respect here in Zarqa. When American forces killed Mr. Zarqawi in Iraq, thousands thronged his funeral here, including four Islamic Action Front members of Parliament who were thrown into prison afterward. But when it comes to politics, Zarqa’s concerns are prosaic. Shoddily built neighborhoods here blur into Palestinian refugee camps, with narrow, poorly maintained streets. The smell of backed-up sewage clouds the city because the government will not improve the inadequate drainage system.

Yet they also seem willing to set aside the frustrations of their daily lives to cast their votes for a group of Islamist candidates whom they fault at times for not being radical enough.

One such voter is Maysoon al-Medhoon, 28, who waited nearly three hours in a friend’s apartment in Zarqa for the opportunity to question the candidate. Ms. Medhoon supports the Islamic Action Front, but only as a temporary salve until Jordan, and the rest of the Muslim world, witnesses a religious revolution that will solve the people’s problems.

“Islam is the only real force for change,” she said. “Islam is the solution for everything.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007
The Power of Birth Order
By Jeffrey Kluger
It could not have been easy being Elliott Roosevelt. If the alcohol wasn't getting him, the morphine was. If it wasn't the morphine, it was the struggle with depression. Then, of course, there were the constant comparisons with big brother Teddy.

In 1883, the year Elliott began battling melancholy, Teddy had already published his first book and been elected to the New York State assembly. By 1891—about the time Elliott, still unable to establish a career, had to be institutionalized to deal with his addictions—Teddy was U.S. Civil Service Commissioner and the author of eight books. Three years later, Elliott, 34, died of alcoholism. Seven years after that, Teddy, 42, became President.

Elliott Roosevelt was not the only younger sibling of an eventual President to cause his family heartaches—or at least headaches. There was Donald Nixon and the loans he wangled from billionaire Howard Hughes. There was Billy Carter and his advocacy on behalf of the pariah state Libya. There was Roger Clinton and his year in jail on a cocaine conviction. And there is Neil Bush, younger sib of both a President and a Governor, implicated in the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s and recently gossiped about after the release of a 2002 letter in which he lamented to his estranged wife, "I've lost patience for being compared to my brothers."

Welcome to a very big club, Bro. It can't be easy being a runt in a litter that includes a President. But it couldn't have been easy being Billy Ripken either, an unexceptional major league infielder craning his neck for notice while the press swarmed around Hall of Famer and elder brother Cal. It can't be easy being Eli Manning, struggling to prove himself as an NFL quarterback while big brother Peyton polishes a Super Bowl trophy and his superman stats. And you may have never heard of Tisa Farrow, an actress of no particular note beyond her work in the 1979 horror film Zombie, but odds are you've heard of her sister Mia.

Of all the things that shape who we are, few seem more arbitrary than the sequence in which we and our siblings pop out of the womb. Maybe it's your genes that make you a gifted athlete, your training that makes you an accomplished actress, an accident of brain chemistry that makes you a drunk instead of a President. But in family after family, case study after case study, the simple roll of the birth-date dice has an odd and arbitrary power all its own.

The importance of birth order has been known—or at least suspected—for years. But increasingly, there's hard evidence of its impact. In June, for example, a group of Norwegian researchers released a study showing that firstborns are generally smarter than any siblings who come along later, enjoying on average a three-point IQ advantage over the next eldest—probably a result of the intellectual boost that comes from mentoring younger siblings and helping them in day-to-day tasks. The second child, in turn, is a point ahead of the third. While three points might not seem like much, the effect can be enormous. Just 2.3 IQ points can correlate to a 15-point difference in sat scores, which makes an even bigger difference when you're an Ivy League applicant with a 690 verbal score going head to head against someone with a 705. "In many families," says psychologist Frank Sulloway, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and the man who has for decades been seen as the U.S.'s leading authority on birth order, "the firstborn is going to get into Harvard and the second-born isn't."

The differences don't stop there. Studies in the Philippines show that later-born siblings tend to be shorter and weigh less than earlier-borns. (Think the slight advantage the 6-ft. 5-in. [196 cm] Peyton Manning has over the 6-ft. 4-in. [193 cm] Eli doesn't help when he's trying to throw over the outstretched arms of a leaping lineman?) Younger siblings are less likely to be vaccinated than older ones, with last-borns getting immunized sometimes at only half the rate of firstborns. Eldest siblings are also disproportionately represented in high-paying professions. Younger siblings, by contrast, are looser cannons, less educated and less strapping, perhaps, but statistically likelier to live the exhilarating life of an artist or a comedian, an adventurer, entrepreneur, GI or firefighter. And middle children? Well, they can be a puzzle—even to researchers.

For families, none of this comes as a surprise. There are few extended clans that can't point to the firstborn, with the heir-apparent bearing, who makes the best grades, keeps the other kids in line and, when Mom and Dad grow old, winds up as caretaker and executor too. There are few that can't point to the lost-in-the-thickets middle-born or the wild-child last-born.

Indeed, to hear families tell it, the birth-order effect may only be getting stronger. In the past, girls were usually knocked out of the running for the job and college perks their place in the family should have accorded them. In most other ways, however, there was little to distinguish a first-, second- or third-born sister from a first-, second- or third-born brother. Now, with college and careers more equally available, the remaining differences have largely melted away.

"There are stereotypes out there about birth order, and very often those stereotypes are spot-on," says Delroy Paulhus, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "I think this is one of those cases in which people just figured things out on their own."

But have they? Stack up enough anecdotal maybes, and they start to look like a scientific definitely. Things that appear definite, however, have a funny way of surprising you, and birth order may conceal all manner of hidden dimensions—within individuals, within families, within the scientific studies. "People read birth-order books the way they read horoscopes," warns Toni Falbo, professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas. "'I'm a middle-born, so that explains everything in my life'—it's just not like that." Still, such skepticism does not prevent more and more researchers from being drawn to the field, and as they are, their findings, and the debate over them, continue to grow.

Humans aren't alone
If you think it's hard to manage the birth-order issues in your family, be thankful you're not an egret or an orange blossom. Egrets are not the intellectual heavyweights of the animal kingdom—or even the bird world—but nature makes them remarkably cunning when it comes to planning their families. Like most other birds, egrets lay multiple eggs, but rather than brooding them all the same way so that the chicks emerge on more or less the same day, the mother begins incubating her first and second eggs before laying the remaining ones in her clutch. That causes the babies to appear on successive days, which gives the first-arriving chick the earliest crack at the food and a 24-hour head start on growth. The second-hatched may not have too difficult a time catching up, but the third may struggle. The fourth and beyond will have the hardest go, getting pushed aside or even pecked to death if food, water and shelter become scarce. All that makes for a nasty nursery, but that's precisely the way the mother wants it. "The parents overproduce a bit," says Douglas Mock, professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma, "maybe making one more baby than they can normally afford to raise and then letting it take the fall if the resource budget is limited."

Orange trees are even tougher on their young. A typical orange tree carries about 100,000 pollinated blossoms, each of which is a potential orange, complete with the seeds that are potential trees. But in the course of a season, only about 500 oranges are actually produced. The tree determines which ones make the cut, shedding the blossoms that are not receiving enough light or that otherwise don't seem viable. It is, for a tree, a sort of selective termination on a vast scale. "You've got 99% of the babies being thrown out by the parent," says Mock. "The tree just drops all the losers."

Even mammals, warm-blooded in metabolism and—we like to think—temperament, can play a similarly pitiless game. Runts of litters are routinely ignored, pushed out or consigned to the worst nursing spots somewhere near Mom's aft end, where the milk flow is the poorest and the outlook for survival the bleakest. The rest of the brood is left to fight it out for the best, most milk-rich positions.

Humans, more sentimental than birds, trees or litter bearers, don't like to see themselves as coming from the same child-rearing traditions, but we face many of the same pressures. As recently as 100 years ago, children in the U.S. had only about a 50% chance of surviving into adulthood, and in less developed parts of the world, the odds remain daunting. It can be a sensible strategy to have multiple offspring to continue your line in case some are claimed by disease or injury.

While the eldest in an overpopulated brood has it relatively easy—getting 100% of the food the parents have available—things get stretched thinner when a second-born comes along. Later-borns put even more pressure on resources. Over time, everyone might be getting the same rations, but the firstborn still enjoys a caloric head start that might never be overcome.

Food is not the only resource. There's time and attention too and the emotional nourishment they provide. It's not for nothing that family scrapbooks are usually stuffed with pictures and report cards of the firstborn and successively fewer of the later-borns—and the later-borns notice it. Educational opportunities can be unevenly shared too, particularly in families that can afford the tuition bills of only one child. Catherine Salmon, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Redlands in Redlands, Calif., laments that even today she finds it hard to collect enough subjects for birth-order studies from the student body alone, since the campus population is typically overweighted with eldest sibs. "Families invest a lot in the firstborn," she says.

All of this favoritism can become self-reinforcing. As parental pampering produces a fitter, smarter, more confident firstborn, Mom and Dad are likely to invest even more in that child, placing their bets on an offspring who—in survival terms at least—is looking increasingly like a sure thing. "From a parental perspective," says Salmon, "you want offspring who are going to survive and reproduce."

Firstborns do more than survive; they thrive. In a recent survey of corporate heads conducted by Vistage, an international organization of ceos, poll takers reported that 43% of the people who occupy the big chair in boardrooms are firstborns, 33% are middle-borns and 23% are last-borns. Eldest siblings are disproportionately represented among surgeons and M.B.A.s too, according to Stanford University psychologist Robert Zajonc. And a recent study found a statistically significant overload of firstborns in what is—or at least ought to be—the country's most august club: the U.S. Congress. "We know that birth order determines occupational prestige to a large extent," says Zajonc. "There is some expectation that firstborns are somehow better qualified for certain occupations."

Little sibs, big role
For eldest siblings, this is a pretty sweet deal. There is not much incentive for them to change a family system that provides them so many goodies, and typically they don't try to. Younger siblings see things differently and struggle early on to shake up the existing order. They clearly don't have size on their side, as their physically larger siblings keep them in line with what researchers call a high-power strategy. "If you're bigger than your siblings, you punch 'em," Sulloway says.

But there are low-power strategies too, and one of the most effective ones is humor. It's awfully hard to resist the charms of someone who can make you laugh, and families abound with stories of last-borns who are the clowns of the brood, able to get their way simply by being funny or outrageous. Birth-order scholars often observe that some of history's great satirists—Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain—were among the youngest members of large families, a pattern that continues today. Faux bloviator Stephen Colbert—who yields to no one in his ability to get a laugh—often points out that he's the last of 11 children.

Such examples might be little more than anecdotal, but personality tests show that while firstborns score especially well on the dimension of temperament known as conscientiousness—a sense of general responsibility and follow-through—later-borns score higher on what's known as agreeableness, or the simple ability to get along in the world. "Kids recognize a good low-power strategy," says Sulloway. "It's the way any sensible organism sizes up the niches that are available."

Even more impressive is how early younger siblings develop what's known as the theory of mind. Very small children have a hard time distinguishing the things they know from the things they assume other people know. A toddler who watches an adult hide a toy will expect that anyone who walks into the room afterward will also know where to find it, reckoning that all knowledge is universal knowledge. It usually takes a child until age 3 to learn that that's not so. For children who have at least one elder sibling, however, the realization typically comes earlier. "When you're less powerful, it's advantageous to be able to anticipate what's going on in someone else's mind," says Sulloway.

Later-borns, however, don't try merely to please other people; they also try to provoke them. Richard Zweigenhaft, a professor of psychology at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., who revealed the overrepresentation of firstborns in Congress, conducted a similar study of picketers at labor demonstrations. On the occasions that the events grew unruly enough to lead to arrests, he would interview the people the police rounded up. Again and again, he found, the majority were later- or last-borns. "It was a statistically significant pattern," says Zweigenhaft. "A disproportionate number of them were choosing to be arrested."

Courting danger
Later-borns are similarly willing to take risks with their physical safety. All sibs are equally likely to be involved in sports, but younger ones are likelier to choose the kinds that could cause injury. "They don't go out for tennis," Sulloway says. "They go out for rugby, ice hockey." Even when siblings play the same sport, they play it differently. Sulloway is currently collaborating on a study of 300 brothers who were major league ballplayers. Though the work is not complete, he is so far finding that the elder brothers excel at skills that involve less physical danger. Younger siblings are the ones who put themselves in harm's way—crouching down in catcher's gear to block an incoming runner, say. "It doesn't just hold up in this study but a dozen studies," Sulloway says.

It's not clear whether such behavior extends to career choice, but Sandra Black, an associate professor of economics at ucla, is intrigued by findings that firstborns tend to earn more than later-borns, with income dropping about 1% for every step down the birth-order ladder. Most researchers assume this is due to the educational advantages eldest siblings get, but Black thinks there may be more to it. "I'd be interested in whether it's because the second child is taking the riskier jobs," she says.

Black's forthcoming studies will be designed to answer that question, but research by Ben Dattner, a business consultant and professor of industrial and organizational psychology at New York University, is showing that even when later-borns take conservative jobs in the corporate world, they approach their work in a high-wire way. Firstborn ceos, for example, do best when they're making incremental improvements in their companies: shedding underperforming products, maximizing profits from existing lines and generally making sure the trains run on time. Later-born ceos are more inclined to blow up the trains and lay new track. "Later-borns are better at transformational change," says Dattner. "They pursue riskier, more innovative, more creative approaches."

If eldest sibs are the dogged achievers and youngest sibs are the gamblers and visionaries, where does this leave those in between? That it's so hard to define what middle-borns become is largely due to the fact that it's so hard to define who they are growing up. The youngest in the family, but only until someone else comes along, they are both teacher and student, babysitter and babysat, too young for the privileges of the firstborn but too old for the latitude given the last. Middle children are expected to step up to the plate when the eldest child goes off to school or in some other way drops out of the picture—and generally serve when called. The Norwegian intelligence study showed that when firstborns die, the IQ of second-borns actually rises a bit, a sign that they're performing the hard mentoring work that goes along with the new job.

Stuck for life in a center seat, middle children get shortchanged even on family resources. Unlike the firstborn, who spends at least some time as the only-child eldest, and the last-born, who hangs around long enough to become the only-child youngest, middlings are never alone and thus never get 100% of the parents' investment of time and money. "There is a U-shaped distribution in which the oldest and youngest get the most," says Sulloway. That may take an emotional toll. Sulloway cites other studies in which the self-esteem of first-, middle- and last-borns is plotted on a graph and follows the same curvilinear trajectory.

The phenomenon known as de-identification may also work against a middle-born. Siblings who hope to stand out in a family often do so by observing what the elder child does and then doing the opposite. If the firstborn gets good grades and takes a job after school, the second-born may go the slacker route. The third-born may then de-de-identify, opting for industriousness, even if in the more unconventional ways of the last-born. A Chinese study in the 1990s showed just this kind of zigzag pattern, with the first child generally scoring high as a "good son or daughter," the second scoring low, the third scoring high again and so on. In a three-child family, the very act of trying to be unique may instead leave the middling lost, a pattern that may continue into adulthood.

The holes in the theories
The birth-order effect, for all its seeming robustness, is not indestructible. There's a lot that can throw it out of balance—particularly family dysfunction. In a 2005 study, investigators at the University of Birmingham in Britain examined the case histories of 400 abused children and the 795 siblings of those so-called index kids. In general, they found that when only one child in the family was abused, the scapegoat was usually the eldest. When a younger child was abused, some or all of the other kids usually were as well. Mistreatment of any of the children usually breaks the bond the parents have with the firstborn, turning that child from parental ally to protector of the brood. At the same time, the eldest may pick up some of the younger kids' agreeableness skills—the better to deal with irrational parents—while the youngest learn some of the firstborn's self-sufficiency. Abusiveness is going to "totally disrupt the birth-order effects we would expect," says Sulloway.

The sheer number of siblings in a family can also trump birth order. The 1% income difference that Black detected from child to child tends to flatten out as you move down the age line, with a smaller earnings gap between a third and fourth child than between a second and third. The IQ-boosting power of tutoring, meanwhile, may actually have less influence in small families, with parents of just two or three kids doing most of the teaching, than in the six- or eight-child family, in which the eldest sibs have to pitch in more. Since the Norwegian IQ study rests on the tutoring effect, those findings may be open to question. "The good birth-order studies will control for family size," says Bo Cleveland, associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University. "Sometimes that makes the birth-order effect go away; sometimes it doesn't."

The most vocal detractors of birth-order research question less the findings of the science than the methods. To achieve any kind of statistical significance, investigators must assemble large samples of families and look for patterns among them. But families are very different things—distinguished by size, income, hometown, education, religion, ethnicity and more. Throw enough random factors like those into the mix, and the results you get may be nothing more than interesting junk.

The alternative is what investigators call the in-family studies, a much more pointillist process, requiring an exhaustive look at a single family, comparing every child with every other child and then repeating the process again and again with hundreds of other families. Eventually, you may find threads that link them all. "I would throw out all the between-family studies," says Cleveland. "The proof is in the in-family design."

Ultimately, of course, the birth-order debate will never be entirely settled. Family studies and the statistics they yield are cold and precise things, parsing human behavior down to decimal points and margins of error. But families are a good deal sloppier than that, a mishmash of competing needs and moods and clashing emotions, better understood by the people in the thick of them than by anyone standing outside. Yet millenniums of families would swear by the power of birth order to shape the adults we eventually become. Science may yet overturn the whole theory, but for now, the smart money says otherwise.

— Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles

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