05 June 2013

Five of the last seven U.S. presidents have been left-handed

Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.

This despite the fact that only 10% of the people in the country are left-handed.

In the previous 200 years there were only two presidents known to be left-handed - James Garfield and Harry Truman.

A New York Sun article discusses this interesting anomaly and speculates about why there has been an apparent surge in lefties; there may be biological and behavioral components, but it's probably just a statistical oddity.

Reposted from 2008.

6 comments:

  1. I wonder how much it has to do with the old-fashioned way people used to suppress their left-handedness?

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  2. where's the link to the article?

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    Replies
    1. Forgot to put it in; fixed. Thanks for the heads-up.

      Delete
  3. More than likely it's because the common practice of making them switch in school has almost stopped. My mother, brother, sister, and one nephew are all left handed, and one of my sister's grade school teachers tried to make her switch. My mom put a stop to that pretty quickly! I do see more left handers now all the time, but maybe I'm sensitive to it.

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  4. It is funny that eventhough I am a leftie, lefties still look awkward to me when they write and Barack Obama above is a good case in point.

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