Should leaders have expected to lead?

 February 21st, 2013
monarchy
I occasionally hear people advocating monarchy with the idea that this way you end up with someone in charge who has known they were going to be running a country since they were a small child and have prepared (and have been prepared) accordingly. This makes some sense: running a country requires a specialized skill-set, and I see how starting on it early could help. But if we look at history, do we find that younger sons who ended up inheriting when they didn't expect to were generally better or worse kings than the ones who knew from birth that they would be king?

(This is going to be distorted by many things, including birth order and that younger sons were still royalty, but it might be a place to start.)

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