Therefore, the issue is not the inherent importance of month of birth as something to investigate. The issue is the degree to which the authors’ finding makes it more difficult for social scientists to use month of birth as a source of “natural experiments” involving more important topics.

As for statistical significance, it should be noted that the authors are using huge samples.

Even if this kind of study was finding an actual correlation between birth month and real life phenomena, that’s not any evidence that their analysis of the data isn’t too simplistic due to lack of detail in the information they have. What if the results they got for the people with birthdays in January were due to a number of discrete and unrelated factors, how would you design remedial measures? I would guess that some of those factors could be due to things like school year or that its easier for teenagers to find places to have sex at one time or another. Maybe the scheduling of proms has something to do with it. But its unlikely that you’re going to find one single reason for it because the reasons for them having unprotected sex are probably quite varied.

Whether or not these kinds of studies would impede the regulation of the banking system might be a simpler thing to study, there being so many fewer economists than teenagers who have children and their professional activities being, perhaps, less varied. If you couldn’t figure out a correlation between the known factors of their documented professional lives, you’re going to have a much harder time with the far more varied and very spottily documented lives of the general population.

But maybe it’s true that economists time might not be well spent on looking into this. I would trust people outside of economics to look into the failures of their profession more than economists, unless they were skeptical of the theories of capitalism and neo-classical economics. I suspect that’s the cause of the failure of economists to see what so many of us did when Phil Graham was gutting banking regulations, their theoretical models overrode what history had shown to have been the real life result of letting people with an economic interest in theft and plunder their ” Freedom to Choose”. J. K. Galbraith once said that an economist should have a thorough knowledge of history which seems to have given away to theoretical fantasy in that profession. And it’s interesting how often, as in the case of “gender science” how those fantasies seem to benefit those with the most money and privilege.