Why your birth-date might make your fortune

Women have been rushing to have selective caesareans and induced labours this week. Why? So that their baby can be blessed with the luck of being born on 9/9/9.
Those born 9 am or 9 pm might even have a double dose of good fortune. An even luckier date was 9/9/1999, when there was a virtual frenzy on labour wards, especially where there are large Chinese communities for whom 9 is a particularly significant number.
Leave aside the day and month for a moment, does it really matter which year you were born in? The answer could be yes. Researchers have indeed found that people born in particular years have greater chances of success and riches than those born in other years.
This is not because the numbers 9 or 7 or whatever have any magical powers. American sociologist C.Wright Mills found that the largest number of super-rich Americans such as John D. Rochefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P Morgan etc were all born within a few years of each other in the 1830s. They are the richest men in history even by today’s standards. And unlike most wealthy people today, did not necessarily come from privileged backgrounds. “The best time during the history of the United States for the poor boy ambitious for high business success to have been born was around the year 1835”, he says.
This was due in part due to the railroad and industrial boom in America. Another fantastic year to have been born was 1955, birth year of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla (founders of Sun Microsystems). It wasn’t the configuration of the stars in the heavens but the coming together of technological advances just at the right time for these men to understand the great opportunities ahead. That does not mean all 1955ers became millionaires, but they had a better chance than many.
In the West, unlucky birth years were at the very end of the 19th Century. Your youth was spent in the trenches of World War I, your working life in the 1930s depression and your 40s and 50s fighting in World War II. Conversely the best birth year was 1930, too young for the depression and War, during the high growth decades of the 1950s and 60s. The writer Malcolm Gladwell makes a lot of this in his excellent book “Outliers, The Story of Success” on why some people achieve more than others, although he makes it clear birth year is not the only factor.
But back to the here and now. Studies have been done in Canada on how recession affected the career paths of those graduating in 1980 and 81 (1959 birthdays), the negative effects lasting a decade or more.
Perhaps we are right to be worried about the 1988 birth year graduating into a recession. There may even be a case for politicians to even out birth year advantages and disadvantages with some kind of affirmative action - just a tongue- in-cheek thought that might prevent women rushing to the labour ward the next time the numbers stack up.