The Silent Generation produced fewer governors, too.

In the previous post I noted that there never has been -- and, barring a win by Biden or Sanders this November, never will be -- a U.S. president from the "Silent Generation" (i.e., born in the 1925-1945 period). However, there have only been 11 presidents born in the 20th century, too small a population for any apparent patterns to be statistically significant.

Following up a hunch that it was, nevertheless, a genuine pattern, I looked at the birthdates of U.S. governors born in the 20th century (excluding Alaska and Hawaii because they could not have had governors born before 1929). Of course there have thus far only been a few governors from Generation X since that cohort is still relatively young, so I focused on the 559 governors born in the 1901-1960 period, comprising three generations. Not all researchers define the generations in the same way, so I excluded from consideration those gray areas (1925-1927, 1943-1945, and 1961-1964) that are sometimes assigned to one generation and sometimes to another. Here are the results:

Average number of U.S. governors born per year

I haven't bothered to calculate a p-value or anything like that, but just eyeballing it, it seems pretty obvious that the Silent Generation is indeed different, producing only 8 governors per year as opposed to 10 for both the Greatest Generation and the Boomers.

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The chart below (click to enlarge) shows the raw data, presented without "generational" assumptions, for presidential and gubernatorial births in the 1901-1960 period.

U.S. presidents and governors born per year, 1901-1960

No very obvious three-generation pattern immediately jumps out from this chart, but what does immediately jump out is that fact that, of the 10 presidents born in this time period, not a single one of them was born in a year that produced a below-median number of governors (the median being 9 governors).

Of the 60 years under consideration, 32 of them produced at least 9 governors. The chance that 10 out of 10 presidents would just happen to be born in one such year is (32/60)¹⁰ = 0.186%, or 1 in 537. This strongly suggests that there is some real sense in which some years produce more executive-branch material than others.

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The chart below shows the same data, plotted for 5-year periods (lustra) rather than for individual years.

Plotted thus, the two-decade flatline of the Silent Generation, bookended by the twin towers of the early '20s and late '40s, is immediately apparent. It is also apparent that the Boomers, unlike the Silents, do not really cohere as a generation as far as gubernatorial potential goes. The highest bar on the graph (late '40s) is immediately followed by the lowest (early '50s), both representing parts of the Baby Boom generation. And again we see that presidents were born only in lustra which also produced an above-median number of governors.