Steven Dubner - Freakonomics

Most Common “High-End” White Girl Names in the 1990s

1. Alexandra

2. Lauren

3. Katherine

4. Madison

5. Rachel

Most Common “Low-End” White Girl Names in the 1990s

1. Amber

2. Heather

3. Kayla

4. Stephanie

5. Alyssa

Notice anything? You might want to compare these names with the “Most Popular White Girl Names” list on page 199, which includes the top ten overall names from 1980 and 2000. Lauren and Madison, two of the most popular “high-end” names from the 1990s, made the 2000 top ten list. Amber and Heather, meanwhile, two of the overall most popular names from 1980, are now among the “lowend” names.

There is a clear pattern at play: once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Amber and Heather started out as high-end names, as did Stephanie and Brittany. For every high-end baby named Stephanie or Brittany, another five lower-income girls received those names within ten years.

So where do lower-end families go name-shopping? Many people assume that naming trends are driven by celebrities. But celebrities actually have a weak effect on baby names. As of 2000, the pop star Madonna had sold 130 million records worldwide but hadn’t generated even the ten copycat namings—in California, no less—required to make the master index of four thousand names from which the sprawling list of girls’ names on page 227 was drawn. Or considering all the Brittanys, Britneys, Brittanis, Brittanies, Brittneys, and Brittnis you encounter these days, you might think of Britney Spears. But she is in fact a symptom, not a cause, of the Brittany/Britney/Brittani/

Brittanie/Brittney/Brittni explosion. With the most common spelling of the name, Brittany, at number eighteen among high-end families and number five among low-end families, it is surely approaching its pull date. Decades earlier, Shirley Temple was similarly a symptom of the Shirley boom, though she is often now remembered as its cause. (It should also be noted that many girls’ names, including Shirley, Carol, Leslie, Hilary, Renee, Stacy, and Tracy began life as boys’ names, but girls’ names almost never cross over to boys.) So it isn’t famous people who drive the name game. It is the family just a few blocks over, the one with the bigger house and newer car. The kind of families that were the first to call their daughters Amber or Heather and are now calling them Lauren or Madison. The kind of families that used to name their sons Justin or Brandon and are now calling them Alexander or Benjamin. Parents are reluctant to poach a name from someone too near—family members or close friends—but many parents, whether they realize it or not, like the sound of names that sound “successful.”

But as a high-end name is adopted en masse, high-end parents begin to abandon it. Eventually, it is considered so common that even lower-end parents may not want it, whereby it falls out of the rotation entirely. The lower-end parents, meanwhile, go looking for the next name that the upper-end parents have broken in.

So the implication is clear: the parents of all those Alexandras, Laurens, Katherines, Madisons, and Rachels should not expect the cachet to last much longer. Those names are already on their way to overexposure. Where, then, will the new high-end names come from?

It wouldn’t be surprising to find them among the “smartest” girls’ and boys’

names in California, listed on pages 197–98, that are still fairly obscure. Granted, some of them—Oona and Glynnis, Florian and Kia—are bound to remain obscure. The same could be surmised of most of the Hebrew names (Rotem and Zofia, Akiva and Zev), even though many of today’s most mainstream names (David, Jonathan, Samuel, Benjamin, Rachel, Hannah, Sarah, Rebecca) are of course Hebrew biblical names. Aviva may be the one modern Hebrew name that is ready to break out: it’s easy to pronounce, pretty, peppy, and suitably flexible.

Drawn from a pair of “smart” databases, here is a sampling of today’s high-end names. Some of them, as unlikely as it seems, are bound to become tomorrow’s mainstream names. Before you scoff, ask yourself this: do any of them seem more ridiculous than “Madison” might have seemed ten years ago?

Most Popular Girl’s Names of 2015?

• Annika

• Ansley

• Ava

• Avery

• Aviva

• Clementine

• Eleanor

• Ella

• Emma

• Fiona

• Flannery

• Grace

• Isabel

• Kate

• Lara

• Linden

• Maeve

• Marie-Claire

• Maya

• Philippa

• Phoebe

• Quinn

• Sophie

• Waverly

Most Popular Boys’ Names of 2015?

• Aidan

• Aldo

• Anderson

• Ansel

• Asher

• Beckett

• Bennett

• Carter

• Cooper

• Finnegan

• Harper

• Jackson

• Johan

• Keyon

• Liam

• Maximilian

• McGregor

• Oliver

• Reagan

• Sander

• Sumner

• Will

Obviously, a variety of motives are at work when parents consider a name for their child. They may want something traditional or something bohemian, something unique or something perfectly trendy. It would be an overstatement to suggest that all parents are looking—whether consciously or not—for a

“smart” name or a “high-end” name. But they are all trying to signal something with a name, whether the name is Winner or Loser, Madison or Amber, Shithead or Sander, DeShawn or Jake. What the California names data suggest is that an overwhelming number of parents use a name to signal their own expectations of how successful their children will be. The name isn’t likely to make a shard of difference. But the parents can at least feel better knowing that, from the very outset, they tried their best.

EPILOGUE:

Two Paths to Harvard

And now, with all these pages behind us, an early promise has been confirmed: this book indeed has no “unifying theme.”

But if there is no unifying theme to Freakonomics, there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world. All it requires is a novel way of looking, of discerning, of measuring. This isn’t necessarily a difficult task, nor does it require supersophisticated thinking. We have essentially tried to figure out what the typical gang member or sumo wrestler figured out on his own (although we had to do so in reverse).

Will the ability to think such thoughts improve your life materially? Probably not. Perhaps you’ll put up a sturdy gate around your swimming pool or push your real-estate agent to work a little harder. But the net effect is likely to be more subtle than that. You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite what they seem; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea. Some of these ideas might make you uncomfortable, even unpopular. To claim that legalized abortion resulted in a massive drop in crime will inevitably lead to explosive moral reactions. But the fact of the matter is that Freakonomics-style thinking simply doesn’t traffic in morality. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

The most likely result of having read this book is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions. Many of them will lead to nothing. But some will produce answers that are interesting, even surprising. Consider the question posed at the beginning of this book’s penultimate chapter: how much do parents really matter?

The data have by now made it clear that parents matter a great deal in some regards (most of which have been long determined by the time a child is born) and not at all in others (the ones we obsess about). You can’t blame parents for trying to do something—anything—to help their child succeed, even if it’s something as irrelevant as giving him a high-end first name.

But there is also a huge random effect that rains down on even the best parenting efforts. If you are in any way typical, you have known some intelligent and devoted parents whose child went badly off the rails. You may have also known of the opposite instance, where a child succeeds despite his parents’ worst intentions and habits.

Recall for a moment the two boys, one white and one black, who were described in chapter 5. The white boy who grew up outside Chicago had smart, solid, encouraging, loving parents who stressed education and family. The black boy from Daytona Beach was abandoned by his mother, was beaten by his father, and had become a full-fledged gangster by his teens. So what became of the two boys?

The second child, now twenty-seven years old, is Roland G. Fryer Jr., the Harvard economist studying black underachievement.

The white child also made it to Harvard. But soon after, things went badly for him. His name is Ted Kaczynski.

NOTES

The bulk of this book was drawn from the research of Steven D. Levitt, often done in concert with one or more collaborators. The notes below include citations for the academic papers on which the material was based. We have also made liberal use of other scholars’ research, which is also cited below; we thank them not only for their work but for the subsequent conversations that allowed us to best present their ideas. Other material in this book comes from previously unpublished research or interviews by one or both of the authors. Material not listed in these notes was drawn from readily accessible databases, news reports, and reference works.

AN EXPLANATORY NOTE

THE ITALICIZED EXCERPTS in this section and elsewhere originally appeared in Stephen J. Dubner, “The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life),” The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003.

INTRODUCTION: THE HIDDEN SIDE OF EVERYTHING

THE FALL AND FALL OF CRIME: The crime-drop argument can be found in Steven D. Levitt, “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990’s: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Six That Do Not,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 1 (2004), pp. 163–90. / 3–4 The superpredator: See Eric Pooley, “Kids with Guns,” New York Magazine, August 9, 1991; John J. DiIulio Jr., “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” Weekly Standard, November 27, 1995; Tom Morganthau,

“The Lull Before the Storm?” Newsweek, December 4, 1995; Richard Zoglin,

“Now for the Bad News: A Teenage Time Bomb,” Time, January 15, 1996; and Ted Gest, “Crime Time Bomb,” U.S. News & World Report, March 25, 1996. / 4

James Alan Fox’s dire predictions can be found in a pair of government reports:

“Trends in Juvenile Violence: A Report to the United States Attorney General on Current and Future Rates of Juvenile Offending” (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996) and “Trends in Juvenile Violence: An Update”

(Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997). / 4 President Clinton’s fearful comment came during a 1997 speech in Boston announcing new anti-crime measures; see Alison Mitchell, “Clinton Urges Campaign Against Youth Crime,” New York Times, February 20, 1997. / 5–6 The story of Norma McCorvey/Jane Roe: See Douglas S. Wood, “Who Is ‘Jane Roe?’: Anonymous No More, Norma McCorvey No Longer Supports Abortion Rights,” CNN.com, June 18, 2003; and Norma McCorvey with Andy Meisler, I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v.