Over the weekend I’ve been gobbling up Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. I still don’t understand strings, branes, and how the known universe might be a projected hologram, but this book gets me further than any of the other popular science treatments I know. The author favors string theory and the idea of extra, hidden dimensions. He also discusses how we are on the verge of testing some of these exotic ideas. Recommended, especially if you find these ideas intriguing but have a hard time grasping them in intuitive terms.

Forthcoming research suggests that the family is a significant source of inequality:

…differences between families explain only 25 percent of the nation’s income inequality; the remaining 75 percent is explained by differences between siblings. More typical of the United States than President Bush and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, he suggests, are the White House’s previous tenant, Bill Clinton, and his half-brother, Roger, a college dropout, onetime cocaine dealer and failed musician. Or, for that matter, Jimmy Carter and his ne’er-do-well brother, Billy (emphasis added).

So what in the family matters? It is not birth order, here the analysis become quite intricate:

…his conclusions – that everything from parental job loss or divorce to race and family size can affect siblings differently – don’t lend themselves to catchy headlines, they arguably provide a more nuanced portrait of internal family dynamics than all-purpose explanations like birth order.

Some of his more provocative findings concern middle-borns. In families with three or more children, Mr. Conley says, middle offspring are less likely to receive financial support for their education and may do less well in school than their older and younger siblings. The chances that a second child will attend private school drop by 25 percent with the birth of a third, Mr. Conley found, and the likelihood that he or she will be held back a year increased severalfold. Unlike typical first- and last-borns, he reasons, middle children never experience family life as an only child; instead, they are forced to compete with their siblings for money and attention. (In this sense, he concedes, birth order does matter: not as a psychological variable but as a constraint on family resources.)

Other findings seem to confirm common-sense intuitions. According to Mr. Conley’s analysis, for example, women are more likely to be as successful as their brothers if their mothers worked outside the home. And, like the long-suffering George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the oldest child still at home at the time of a parental death or divorce is more likely than younger siblings to endure negative socioeconomic consequences as a result. Brothers and sisters may even experience race differently, he argues, since skin color can vary considerably within the same family.

So far it seems that the work is well-received. Here is the home page of the researcher, Dalton Conley, a remarkably prolific and rigorous scholar. Here is an earlier MR post on Horatio Alger and intergenerational mobility.

The (provisional) bottom line: Unhappy with your lot in life? It’s not the capitalist system or the Bush tax cuts, blame Mom and Dad. I’ll let you know more once the book arrives and I’ve read the whole thing.

What best predicts whether a marriage will last?

The crucial predictors, say the researchers, are the presence of facial expressions that accompany emotions such as contempt. Gottman says that just watching a couple and looking for this expression, described as a sideways pull of a corner of the mouth accompanied by rolling eyes, is enough to make a good guess about a couple’s suitability. “This is our best predictor,” he says. “Contempt is the sulphuric acid of love.”

We are told that the entire model has a 94 percent success rate in predicting divorce.

Here is some positive advice for Valentine’s Day:

Gottman may also have stumbled across the secret of a lasting relationship – simply ignore the nasty comments from your partner. He says that courting couples tend to ignore negative statements and pay more attention to positive remarks. Once married, this trend often reverses, although couples that remain together into their sixties retain this outlook.

How about gay couples?

…gay and lesbian couples, as well as heterosexual couples that do not marry, hold on to the positive value of courtship better than straight partners who get hitched, he says.

For more information, read The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models. Are they joking with that title?

Relative to email, that is. Why? Email leaves a permanent record and you are afraid of getting caught in your lies.

Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 30 students to keep a communications diary for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told.

Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and a whopping 37 per cent of phone calls.

That’s a lot of lying. Here is the full story.