122. How Much Does Your Name Matter?

A kid's name can tell us something about his parents -- their race, social standing, even their politics. But is your name really your destiny?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:19Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:09Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dalton Conley is a sociologist at NYU. He has a book coming out soon called Parentology. It's about-- well, here, let's have him tell you.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  I think the subtitle says it all, which is, "A social scientist experiments on his kids, so you don't have to." Here they are.

• 3:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. So here they are. You guys want to introduce yourselves? I don't care who goes first.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm E., like the letter. I'm 15, and I'm a student.

• 3:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, hi, E.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  I'm Yo, in like the slang. I'm 13, and I'm a student, too.

• 3:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's right. Dalton Conley named his daughter E. and his son Yo. But there's more. Can you give your full name?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  E. Harper Nora Chirimajenko Conley.

• 3:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so E. is your first name.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  The capitalized E.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  The idea is that she can choose what it stands for.

• 3:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. So E., you still call yourself E. at 15. Do you do so happily?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I love my name.

• 3:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't blame you.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I want to be called something your whole life. You can't really change it.

• 3:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yo, can you give us your full name?

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Yo Xing Haino Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Chirimajenko Conley.

• 4:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Yo, okay, where's your first name? Yo comes from where?

• 4:09Speaker 03

  I think it comes from the Y chromosome.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And that we were confounding ethnic stereotypes, so, you know, plenty of-- there's plenty of Howard Chungs out there who assimilate to white America by how they choose their first name. That's a classic immigrant strategy.

• 4:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  But there aren't many Conleys who take a Chinese.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Right, going the other way.

• 4:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yo was actually born with a slightly less complicated name. Yo Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Jeremijenko Connolly. The Shing, Hano, and Knuckles were added later when he was about four. And what about the order where these names were dropped in? The Hano and the Knuckles, whose choice was that?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I think that's just pleasing to the ear.

• 4:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the obvious question is, why? Why such unusual, complicated names? To some degree, it's an experiment. Because Dalton Connolly thinks that who you are, who you turn out to be, may be related to what you're called when you're born.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Of course, it's hard to separate out cause and effect here until Kim Jong-un allows me to randomly assign all the names of North Korean kids. But I can't know that I'm weird because I was given a weird name or because my parents are weird and they passed that on. But my gut tells me that it does affect who you are and how you behave and probably makes you more creative to have an unusual name.

• 5:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, on balance, for both of you guys, would you say that having an unusual name has been a positive or negative overall?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Well, you can never really know because you can't live another life. But I do think that I'm grateful for my name. It has been a positive impact.

• 5:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is it like to have a dad who's a sociologist who looks at children and people through a lens?

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Well, it's trained me a lot in dealing with other adults. Because when I was a kid, he could know when I'm lying. But so I got really good at lying and stuff. But it kind of sucks to be experimented on. Like, all of a sudden, he's like, guess what, son? You're not getting computer or TV for a month because I want to see how that goes.

• 6:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you've told me how you feel about having your name. But how do you feel about your parents giving you these names?

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Um, well, like, it doesn't really weigh on me at all, like, anymore.

• 6:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  But, like, there's a bunch of people on the internet that, um, get super mad about, like, have these angry comments about any article, like, about it, like, like, my dad's been called, like, the retard of the decade and stuff for naming me that.

• 7:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really? Of the decade? That's quite an honor.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  F-tard.

• 7:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  The F-tard of the decade. And does that hurt your feelings, or more, like, on your dad's behalf?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Uh, no, I found it really hilarious, actually.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  Hello, Freakonomics Radio. Hello, Freakonomics guys. Hello, Tucker.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  I'm calling to tell you about my name.

• 7:56Speaker 06

  My name is Bronwyn Stein. Arwen Laurlin Honnecali Mix III. Mashiah Hawk. M-A-S-H-I-Y-A-P-H.

• 8:06Speaker 07

  A-Z-Z-O-R-R-A-H-H-S-O-D.

• 8:09Speaker 06

  J-A-S-E-L-Y-N.

• 8:12Speaker 07

  You're never supposed to trust a man with two first names. A-U-N-A-K-U, wait, A-U-N-A-H-H-K-W-A apostrophe I-L.

• 8:23Speaker 06

  My full name currently is letter M. Marie Maxwell. My name used to be Vani Wobig, so my initials were V-W, but then I got married and now my initials are V-D. Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 07

  My name is R Eugene Russell, which is both a question and an answer.

• 8:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what do you think of someone who names his kids E. and Yo.? Well, that probably depends on a lot of things, your personal preferences, also your religious and familial traditions. You may think it's clever and creative. You may think it's silly, even cruel. Now, will E. and Yo, the people, turn out to be different than if they'd been named Sarah and Jake? As E. put it, very wisely,

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Well, you can never really know because you can't live another life.

• 9:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  You can't live another life. And that's why it's hard to measure something like the effect of a name. My Freakonomics friend and co-author, Steve Levitt, he has spent his academic career trying to come up with clever ways to measure things. And he's thought quite a bit about the names we give our kids.

• 9:42Speaker 08

  I think ultimately, all a name really does is it's a vehicle for the parents to signal what kind of person they are. It's really a means of establishing-

• 9:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  They are and/or the kind of person that they hope their child will become.

• 9:57Speaker 08

  I don't even know if I think it's the second. I think it really is about the parents. As I've studied naming, what I've come to believe is that the primary purpose, when a parent gives a name, is to impress their friends that they are whatever kind of person they want to be. And I think some of the best evidence of this comes from the radical revolution in black names that happened in the 1970s. People don't really remember this, but if you go back to the 1960s, blacks and whites, basically, were giving their kids pretty much the same sets of names, not really very different, a lot of overlap. But within about a seven-year period in the 1970s, names just completely diverged.

• 10:38Speaker 08

  And among most African-Americans now are given names that virtually no whites have. So what we saw was, in a period that really coincides with the Black Power movement and a very strong move away from the initial civil rights movement, was that names changed completely. And many black parents decided, I think, that the identity they wanted for their children was one that was distinct from white culture.

• 11:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, the fact is that black and white names 100 years ago could be really different, too. Black baby boys were often given names that relatively few whites had. Ambrose and Booker, Moses and Percy, and the modern equivalents, DeShawn and Marquis, Tyrone and Demetrius. Some years back, Steve Levitt started to wonder if these distinctively black names mattered, that is, whether they affected, for better or worse, the life of a kid with such a name. So Levitt did some research with Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard, who is devoted to explaining the gap between blacks and whites in education, income, and culture. Here's Levitt again.

• 11:55Speaker 08

  We didn't really care about black names, per se. What Roland and I were trying to get at was black culture. So the idea was, we knew that we observed really big differences in economic outcomes for African-Americans and for whites. We know we observe really big cultural differences between African-Americans and whites. And the question was, is there any causal link between those two? Could it be that somehow black culture was interfering with black economic success? And the difficulty, whenever you start talking about things like culture, is how do you quantify it? How do you capture what culture means in a way that an economist in data would find it? And so what we settled on was the idea

• 12:36Speaker 08

  that you could use names as an indicator of culture, because the set of names that parents choose are very different for blacks and whites, and they also reflect the way that people think about the world.

• 12:57Speaker 06

  My name is Hawa Nana Aradua Lassana. My parents are Ghanaian and Liberian, and I'm first-generation African-American. My first name is Shayna. It's a Jewish name, but people always seem to think I'm black.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  My name is Stephan, and I'm, coincidentally, African-American. So people automatically assume that my name is Stephan when they're reading it, even though it's spelled S-P-E-P-H-E-N.

• 13:32Speaker 08

  So the ultimate question we wanted to answer is, does your name matter for the economic life that you end up leading? Are people who are quote "saddled" with distinctively black names facing a burden when they enter the labor market?

• 13:51Speaker 08

  So wanting to study names and having the right dataset are two different things. But we managed to stumble onto an amazing dataset that was kept by the state of California. It encompassed the birth certificate of every person born in the state of California between 1960 and the year 2000, and it included the name of the baby, the first and last name, the first and last name of the mother, and the maiden name of the mother, along with a lot of other information about the hospital and the kind of health care that the mother had that gave you a hint at some of the economic circumstances. And this turned out to be the absolutely perfect dataset to do what we wanted to do.

• 14:33Speaker 08

  What we could do is we could match up two young African-American girls at birth, say born in 1965, who are born at the same hospital about the same time to a set of parents who, on all the data we have, look very similar, except that one of those sets of parents give their daughter a distinctively black name, like Shaniqua, say, and the other set of parents give their baby a more traditional white name, like Anne or Elizabeth. And so what do we do? We follow those girls. We fast forward, say, 25 years into the future when those girls grow up in California and have babies themselves. And so from when they give birth,

• 15:16Speaker 08

  we can see what kind of lives they're leading, whether they have fancy health care, whether they're married, how old they are when they have babies, things like that. And we get a glimpse into their economic life. It's not perfect. We certainly don't know everything about them, but we know certain things about them. And we were able to see something quite remarkable, which is that the name that you were given at birth seemed not to matter at all to your economic life.

• 15:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Remember that conclusion. The name you are given at birth does not seem to matter at all to your economic life. In other words, it's not the name your parents give you, it's the kind of parents you have in the first place. And different kinds of parents, of course, choose different kinds of names. So, let's say two similar families, both African-American, each have a baby girl. One is called Molly, which it happens is one of the whitest girls' names in America. And the other is called Latonya, which is a distinctively black name. Now, if, decades later, Molly becomes, let's say, a professor at Harvard, and Latonya

• 16:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  is just barely scraping by, well, the reason won't be because Latonya's parents named her Latonya. Begin, if you would, just by introducing yourself, say your name and what you do.

• 16:48Speaker 09

  Sure, I'm Latonya Sweeney. I'm a professor of government and technology here at Harvard.

• 16:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so there you go. At Harvard, Latonya Sweeney studies how technology can help solve society's problems. In the course of doing so, she occasionally discovers a new problem. Like, the day not long ago, when she and a colleague named Adam Tanner were working in her office...

• 17:16Speaker 09

  He and I were working on a different project, and he needed to find a paper of mine, so he went to my computer and Googled my name, and along with the links to various papers and so forth, this ad popped up to the right that said, "Latonya Sweeney arrested." And I basically almost fell out of the chair, because, one, I'd never been arrested, and then my name is so unusual that it's hard to imagine that that could have been a mistake. And the name appeared right in the ad. So then we typed in his name and his name, a white male name, Adam Tanner. And the same company had an ad, but the ad just said, "Looking for Adam Tanner." You know, it was very neutral.

• 17:58Speaker 09

  It didn't have any, the word "arrest" didn't show up, no reference to a criminal record.

• 18:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, did you immediately become suspicious? Or did you just think, "Well, this is some kind of one-off and let me explore further"?

• 18:08Speaker 09

  Well, right. I mean, on the one hand, you think it's one-off, but on the other hand, it's something kind of fluky. But on the other hand, you're like, "Well, why did it happen?". And so, we began just entering names and all kinds of names. And we spent a couple of hours doing so.

• 18:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  The ads were for a company called Instant Checkmate, which sells public records. The ads appear when you do a Google search for the first and last name of a real person. But, a given name search might generate different versions of the ad. Some of them are neutral, like "Looking for Molly Sweeney", and others, like the one LaTanya Sweeney found, seem to offer up arrest records. Sweeney and Tanner started doing lots of name searches to see if they could find a pattern to the ads.

• 18:57Speaker 09

  And we began focusing on LaTanya versus Tanya. And what we found in each of those cases was if you had LaTanya with a last name, you got an ad suggesting that you had an arrest record. And if you typed in Tanya with a last name, you didn't. And then Adam jumps to this conclusion. He says, "Oh, I get it. They're coming up, the arrest ads are coming up when there's a black sounding name."

• 19:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh huh.

• 19:21Speaker 09

  And I said, "That's impossible. That's crazy talk." And I eventually got to the point where I said, "Okay, I'm a scientist. Let me put on my official science hat and start from step one, and I'm going to show Adam he's wrong." That was the whole goal, was to show him he was wrong. The goal was never to write a paper. The goal was to show Adam he was wrong.

• 19:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  The first step for Sweeney was to simply define what is a black name and what is a white name. So she assembled some data, which included the lists that we created for our first book, Freakonomics, of the whitest and blackest names among baby boys and girls.

• 20:01Speaker 09

  So the white female names were Molly, Amy, Claire, Emily, Katie, Madeline, Caitlin, and Emma. The black female names, Imani, Ebony, Shanice, Alaya, Precious, Nia, Deja, Diamond, Latonya and Latisha. The white male names were Jake, Connor, Tanner, Wyatt, Cody, Dustin, Luke, and Jack. And the black male names, Deshawn, Deandre, Marcus, Darnell, Terrell, Malik, Trevin, and Tyrone.

• 20:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  In order to prompt the Google ads, Sweeney needed to find real first and last names, some black and some white. So she would type in a search like Shanice PhD or Molly MBA to find real people, some of whom were, like herself, professionals. And then she would feed those real names back into Google to see what ads they would prompt. So break it down for me, Latonya. Having a distinctively black first name makes it how likely to prompt an ad for an arrest record? And compare that to having a distinctively white name, then?

• 21:14Speaker 09

  Well, a black identifying name was 25% more likely than a white identifying name to get an ad suggestive of an arrest record.

• 21:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. So you may be thinking that that makes sense because the average black American is more likely to get arrested than the average white American.

• 21:35Speaker 09

  Well, what's interesting is that these ads appear regardless of whether the company actually has a criminal record for that name in their database.

• 21:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  As most people know by now, Google makes its money with a program called AdWords, which serves ads that are linked to the content that you search for. Advertisers, like Instant Checkmate, agree to pay a certain amount each time their ad is clicked on. They provide Google with several versions of ad text, and they can specify which keywords, or in this case, which key names, will prompt each version of the ad. It is, of course, in the best interest of both Google and the advertiser to serve the ads that will get the most clicks.

• 22:25Speaker 09

  The idea of the Google algorithm is it says, okay, we don't know which of these five versions of ads are going to make the most money. So what we're going to do is we're going to let the algorithm learn over time which one tends to get the most clicks. So at first, all five ad copies, say for Ebony Jones, are equally likely to appear, and so it would randomly pick one on a search for Ebony Jones, display it. If that one gets clicked, it gets weighted, and so over time, the one having the heaviest weight will get displayed more often. If we assume for a moment that Instant Checkmate had placed the ads somewhat roughly the same

• 23:05Speaker 09

  text for all the names evenly, let's just assume that's the case, then an explanation of what we're seeing is that it's basically some kind of bias effect from society. So people see an arrest ad for a black name, they tend to click it, but when they see the arrest ad associated with a white name, they tend to ignore it.

• 23:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so this is important, though, because when you come out with a finding like this, most people immediately want to search for the villain. You're saying the villain might be the company, the villain might be Google, and the villain might be all of us.

• 23:42Speaker 09

  Right.

• 23:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let's get back to your name. So when your name first showed up, when Adam searched for your name on your computer and the ad that was generated said, "Latonya Sweeney arrested," take me down the road now from there to why that matters, what it implies, what it made you feel personally about your name being there, and more broadly, what's wrong with that?

• 24:09Speaker 09

  In terms of, for me personally, it was really this shock factor, you know, that I had never been arrested, and it's kind of, you don't want that associated with you. You know, like, why should that be associated with my name or my image to anyone? And when I put my scientific hat on, the question was, what does racial discrimination really mean, and how do you operationalize it scientifically or statistically? And so racial discrimination basically results when a person or a group of people are being treated differently. You either give or withhold benefits, facilities, services, opportunities, there might be some kind of economic loss, or something along those lines, that they would otherwise be

• 24:51Speaker 09

  entitled to, but they're being denied it on the basis of race. The other thing that I looked to in terms of structuring how this fit into societal norms versus technology, was realizing that searching online, especially when the ads are delivered by such a huge service like Google Ads, it almost begins to harbor this notion of structural racism, that is, that you can't help but it foster a discriminatory outcome. So two people are in contest, I Google one name, and I end up with an arrest ad, I Google the other name, and there's no implication of an arrest ad. Even if I never click it, it has the difference of that implication.

• 25:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  So even though you obviously have a good job now, did it concern you for your future?

• 25:39Speaker 09

  No.

• 25:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  No?

• 25:41Speaker 09

  No, I tell you, when I got really moved in that regard was more looking at the faces of the names of these, you know, young PhD students and people who are just launching their careers. There was one, I forget which name it is, but I remember it was a young woman, she was so proud, she had just published her first paper, and she was a graduate student in a PhD program, and, you know, you're just, and there, you know, there is her name, and there's this ad arrested, and how wrong that was. It just seemed so wrong.

• 26:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  For the record, a Google spokesperson told us that, quote, "AdWords does not conduct any racial profiling. It is up to individual advertisers to decide which keywords they want to choose to trigger their ads," end quote. Instant Checkmate didn't respond to our query, but an official statement from the company about Latanya Sweeney's study says, quote, "Instant Checkmate would like to state unequivocally that it has never engaged in racial profiling in Google AdWords and that we have absolutely no technology in place to even connect a name with a race," end quote.

• 27:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  So whoever the villain is here, and it may be us, the people who click, the point is that in this case, your name matters. Now, remember, Steve Levitt and Roland Fryer's research found that your name doesn't affect your economic outcome. But you can certainly imagine a circumstance wherein Latanya Sweeney, before she got hired at Harvard, let's say, might have suffered the consequences of her name if an HR person was Googling her and saw that "arrested" ad, even if the HR person didn't bother to click on the ad, and even though Latanya Sweeney herself hadn't been arrested.

• 27:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  It could certainly change the calculus of a hiring decision, don't you think?

• 28:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  When we come back, we'll tally up the score. Does your name matter, or doesn't it? And we will look at the naming patterns among conservative families, which tend to be pretty conservative, and liberal families.

• 28:18Speaker 10

  Educated liberal mothers tend to be choosing names that are obscure cultural references. And so these are the Esme's, and the Unas, and the Archimedes, and the Emerson's. And we think this is a way that liberals signal their cultural, for lack of a better word, their sense of cultural superiority.

• 28:43Speaker 11

  Hi, my name is Rocket Heatherland, and I live in Denver, Colorado. I'm 10 years old, and I think my name Rocket is actually kind of cool, and other people think it is. My dad's a rocket engineer, so a lot of people think that my name Rocket was because of him, but actually it was the opposite. He was in college when I was born, and then when I was one or two, got out of college and was looking for a job, and tried out for this rocket engineer interview. And when he was in the interview, he mentioned that his son's name was Rocket, and so he got the job. So I kind of think he got the job because of me. And my sister wants me to mention that her name is Roxanne.

• 29:42Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:44Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:29Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:51Speaker 04

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 32:07Speaker 12

  My name is Harry Gill Potter. Sometime around 2000, all of a sudden, every time I went to the airport or tried to use my credit card, suddenly, everybody thought it was really, really funny.

• 32:20Speaker 06

  Hi, my name is Chardney Pickard. My twin sister's name is Paris. My parents' names are Chardney and Paris because it related to where we were conceived. My dad always said that it was better than being named Button Ford, which is probably some other kid's conception story. Hi, my name is Ellen Chang. But actually, my formal name on my passport is Ching Ching Chang. That is a translation of my Chinese name. Originally in Chinese, it's actually pronounced Zhang Xin Qi, but it became Ching Ching Chang, which is weird.

• 33:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the economists Steve Levitt and Roland Fryer went through decades of baby name data and concluded that the name you give your child does not move the needle on that child's future economic life. But there's other research which finds that a name may matter, at least on some dimensions. Boys with feminine names, it's been argued, act up more in school. A girl with a masculine name, meanwhile, is more likely to have a successful legal career. And another study by Mary Ann Bertrand and Sendhil Malinathan was called, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakeisha and Jamal?"

• 33:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  This study found that if you send out a resume with a white-sounding name, it's about 50% more likely to get a call back than an identical resume where all you've done is changed the name to a black-sounding name. So which argument is right? Does a name matter? Or does it not matter?

• 34:09Speaker 08

  I think that both could be right. There are ways to reconcile them. So let's start with the audit studies.

• 34:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Steve Levitt again. The audit study is the one with the resumes.

• 34:22Speaker 08

  So in the audit studies, what researchers do is take identical resumes and they just change the name, the first name, so that one name is distinctively black and another name isn't. And they send those out to employers and see whether there's a call back. And what they find every time is that if you have a distinctively black name, you're less likely to get a call back. So how can that be reconciled with the fact that in our data, in real-life data, how people actually lived, the names didn't seem to matter? Well, I think the answer comes in a couple of different ways. The first is that just because you get a call back doesn't mean that you're likely to get a job. And so to the extent that there are discriminatory employers out there, and those discriminatory employers are using your name to figure out whether or not you're black, then indeed, the worst thing you could possibly do

• 35:07Speaker 08

  would be to show up for an interview, if you are black, with a white name. And have wasted all day, you know, trundling downtown to do the interview for a discriminatory employer who's not going to hire you anyway. Now, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that there are two different kinds of labor markets. There's a sort of formal labor market that involves resumes and applying, and really hardly anybody gets jobs that way. That's not the typical way people get jobs. And your black name might hurt you in that segment, but it might actually help you in other areas. So you can certainly imagine that within the black community, having a distinctively black name would help you get along better with people, signal that you're part of the community, and might work in your favor in all sorts of informal networks that aren't captured in these audit data.

• 36:04Speaker 13

  Hi, this is DeeDee Jones, but my first name is actually Raydina. My parents very romantically named me Raydina after themselves, Raymond and Dina. However, in the mid 80s, when applying for jobs in Denver, used Raydina Jones on my resume and got a big fat zero number of responses. Now, newly minted CPA, pretty marketable kind of person back then, sent out resume after resume with no response, changed my resume name to DeeDee Jones rather than Raydina Jones, and instantly started getting responses. So I think I might be the blondest, most blue-eyed person ever discriminated against based on a name that sounded very, very ethnic.

• 36:51Speaker 08

  All right, let's get beyond black and white names. The fact is that your name will probably not affect your life too much in any significant way, but it can tell people a little something about who your parents are. There are patterns to be gleaned from names data, not only ethnic and religious patterns, but clues about your parents' values and their social standing.

• 37:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, one of the most predictable patterns when it comes to names is that almost every name that becomes popular starts out as a high-class name or a high-education name. So in these California data we had, we could see the education level of the parents. And even the names that eventually become the, quote, "trashiest" kinds of names, so the Tiffany's and the Britney's and I'll probably get myself into trouble and the Caitlyn's and things like that, start at the top of the income distribution. And over the course of 20 or 30 or 40 years, they migrate their way down, becoming more and more popular among the less-educated set. And as names become popular among the less-educated, the higher-educated parents absolutely abandon these names and don't want anything to do with them.

• 38:06Speaker 10

  We named our daughter Esme, you know, because it's this kind of obscure literary reference to a J.D. Salinger short story. As a way of signaling to other people, oh, if you know that Esme references J.D. Salinger, you'll know of our, you know, great intellect.

• 38:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Eric Oliver.

• 38:25Speaker 10

  I'm a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

• 38:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, and what's a successful political scientist like you doing mucking around in the baby-name research ghetto?

• 38:35Speaker 10

  Well, I was very interested in this question of ideological polarization. We hear a lot these days about liberals and conservatives, and particularly about how liberals drive Volvos, drink lattes, listen to NPR. Conservatives drive trucks, watch NASCAR.

• 38:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  God bless them.

• 38:53Speaker 10

  And I wanted to see if there was any truth to these allegations. And the difficulty is, is when you look at consumer products, is that consumer products are marketed to specific groups. And a lot of products, what may look like a conservative or a liberal product, may be more a function of region or social class and not necessarily a product of ideology, per se. So is Subaru a liberal car or is just Subaru a car that's more likely to be driven in snowy mountain roads, which typically are more liberal-voting areas?

• 39:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  But baby names, Eric Oliver figured, were a pretty straight-up indicator of, well, of something.

• 39:37Speaker 10

  Baby names, what is, at first glance, may seem like a relatively frivolous kind of concept, they're incredibly powerful indicators of status, of aspiration, of taste and identity. And so we thought, wow, you know, baby names would be a great place to look. If we were particularly interested, do liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different taste? Also, do liberals and conservatives exhibit any systematic differences in how they signal to each other or to the rest of the country what their tastes are, what their values are? And do these signals penetrate more than just, say, something like a bumper sticker or a t-shirt with a political slogan, but actually influence other ways that they sort of act and talk and behave in society?

• 40:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Eric Oliver, like Steve Levitt, used the very rich database from the state of California. In addition to listing every baby born, it listed information about the mother, including age, race, education level, and zip code, from which it's easy to figure out whether the family lives in a predominantly liberal or conservative neighborhood.

• 40:44Speaker 10

  So as a mother becomes better educated, she's much more likely to give her boy or girl a popular name, and much less likely to give her an uncommon or unique name. And one of the statistics that just leaps out at us about this is that amongst African-American mothers with less than a high school degree, 36% of them give their daughters a unique name. Now, just the statistical probability that you could give your child a name that nobody else would have is really kind of remarkable. And if you think about it as a sort of act of imagination, it's pretty astounding.

• 41:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you this, though. So you're saying that generally, higher-income families, higher-status families tend to use more popular names. But we should distinguish, and I may be wrong here, but let me ask you, once you get over a certain level of education, the most highly-educated families then tend to go a little bit more into the less-popular, more-cutting-edge names, or no?

• 41:39Speaker 10

  Well, this is where ideology starts to have an effect. Amongst educated white mothers, mothers with some college education or a college degree, by and large, they tend to favor more common or popular names for their children than less educated white mothers, except when you start talking about their ideology. Suddenly, you get a big difference here. And what you find is that conservative mothers are much more likely to stay with and choose common or popular names, but liberal mothers now are starting to choose more uncommon names. A liberal mother is about 50% more likely to give her girl an uncommon or unique name than a conservative mother. And she's about 40% more likely to give her boy an uncommon or unique name compared to a conservative mother.

• 42:23Speaker 10

  Now, there's a big difference between the uncommon names that an educated liberal mother is giving her child versus an uneducated, non-ideological mother. Our less educated mothers, when they're giving unique or uncommon names, they're oftentimes either taking a normal name and giving it a very weird spelling, like Madison with two Y's, or they're just making a name up that has never existed before, like Doringa.

• 42:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh huh. Oh, I like Doringa.

• 42:48Speaker 10

  Whereas our educated liberal mothers tend to be choosing names that are obscure cultural references. And so, these are the Esme's and the Unas and the Archimedes and the Emerson's. And we think this is a way that liberals signal their cultural, for lack of a better word, their sense of cultural superiority. It's a way of signaling great cultural capital.

• 43:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why don't you tell me the central finding about the sounds of liberal versus conservative names?

• 43:18Speaker 10

  So, we weren't just interested in the categories of name, whether it was a popular or an unpopular name. We were also interested, do liberals and conservatives choose different sounding kinds of names? One thing that was particularly fascinating to us was this idea that conservatives tend to be drawn to more masculine paternalistic metaphors in their political rhetoric, and that liberals tend to be drawn to more nurturing feminine metaphors in their political rhetoric. And we wanted to test this out and see that, well, does this also influence name choice? And would conservatives choose more masculine sounding types of names and liberals choose more feminine sounding kinds of names? Well, then, that begs the question, what's a feminine sounding name and what's a masculine sounding name?

• 44:01Speaker 10

  Boys' names are more likely to have hard consonants to be monosyllabic.

• 44:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Kurt.

• 44:06Speaker 10

  Yeah, Kurt's and to have that "r" sound is very common in boys' names. They're more likely to have that "o", like kind of Joe sound.

• 44:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 44:14Speaker 10

  Whereas girls' names are much more likely to end in a "schwa" "a" sound, that like Ella or Thea. And they're much more likely to have "ls" in them. And they're much more likely to end in that "e" sound.

• 44:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha. So "ls" and vowel endings for girls and boys, kind of short, stout, compact, hard consonants, roughly?

• 44:34Speaker 10

  Right. So what we find is that by and large conservatives choose more masculine sounding names for both boys and girls.

• 44:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, okay.

• 44:41Speaker 10

  And liberals are much more likely to choose feminine sounding names for both boys and girls.

• 44:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha.

• 44:46Speaker 10

  And so if you really want to know the most quintessentially kind of ideological sounding names, let's compare the Obama girls and the Palin kids. So the Obama girls are Sasha and Malia, very nice feminine, soft sounding names. And then think about the Palin kids. We have Trig, Track, Bristol, and Piper. And there's Willow there, too. And I think that was an ideological hiccup on Sarah Palin's part.

• 45:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. So let me just ask you, off the top of your head, Eric, let's say that you, now knowing what you know about this research, were to see two houses on a hill, one on each hill. And then the one is a high-income, very ideologically liberal family. And then the other is a high-income ideological conservative family. And they're all white. And both families have 10 children. Okay? I want you to name the 10 children in each of the households, please. Just tell me what you think they'd be.

• 45:47Speaker 10

  Sure. Say there are five boys and five girls in each house.

• 45:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sure, if you want, yeah, okay.

• 45:52Speaker 10

  Okay. So in the conservative house, the boys would be likely to be something like Andrew, Ethan, Dylan, Caleb, and Carter.

• 46:03Speaker 10

  The girls would have names like Casey, Mackenzie, Jordan, Taylor, and Sarah. In our liberal house, we would have some of the same names because there are a lot of names that go across ideology. So we'd probably find another Ethan in the liberal house, but we'd more likely to find a Joshua, a Dylan, a Charlie, and a Leaf among the boys.

• 46:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 46:22Speaker 10

  The girls would have much more distinct kinds of names. They would have names like Lola, Mia, Thea, Eliana, and Ruby.

• 46:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha. So I guess the question is this, though. Most signaling, it strikes me, is done subconsciously at best, but not overtly consciously. In fact, I guess what I'm saying is most people would never admit to saying, "I want to give my child an X name or a Y name so that people will know that I am X or Y." Do you agree or no?

• 46:49Speaker 10

  Oh, I very much agree. And that's what's fascinating about this, is that there are these trends happening in names, but I don't think the people who are giving the names are conscious of the forces that are influencing their own behaviors and their decisions. And this is common with baby names. I mean, everyone thinks that they're choosing, "Oh, a name that's just so special for their child, and it's only when they get to the playground and there are half a dozen other Elas there, that they realize that, oh, you know, maybe I'm part of a social trend."

• 47:27Speaker 05

  Hi, my name is Steven Daniel Fass. My name is Steven William Zekoff.

• 47:32Speaker 07

  First name is Steve. Never Steven. Steven with a PH, not with a V. If you use a V, I'll become very aggressive and refuse to cash your checks.

• 47:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Levitt, you and I share a first name, although we spell it differently. You go for the V, I've got the PH. I have to tell you, last time I looked, the PH was definitely the higher end of the two names, although obviously you're higher end than me. So how much can that really say?

• 48:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, my parents missed the boat. By the time they named me, Steve was in serious decline. I was, I was the tail end of, of the Stephens. You're a few years older than me. Your, your parents were definitely hipper than my parents.

• 48:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nah, nah, nah. Plus, they were just looking for the good saint. But our names, especially if you combine the two spellings, we were, I think, top three or four in the country at the time. Have you looked at it lately, Steven?

• 48:26Speaker 08

  I haven't, but I know we're almost impossible to find right now.

• 48:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yep. Let me ask you this. So when we wrote about names in Freakonomics, we made it pretty clear that naming is not destiny, right? That was really one of the single biggest takeaways. In fact, we told the story of these two brothers in New York whose parents had named them Loser and Winner. And the fact was is that Loser turned out to have a great life as an upstanding citizen. He was a police detective. And Winner had been a career criminal. And we told that story to reinforce the point that naming is not destiny. However, do you find that a lot of people who read Freakonomics get it or remember it exactly wrong?

• 49:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, it is amazing how everyone thinks that we said the opposite. People want so badly to believe that names are destiny. And what's funny, I mean, the ultimate is Morgan Spurlock. So in the Freakonomics movie, he gets a chapter on names and he does it completely backwards. And we tell him that it's completely backwards. And he's completely unbothered by the fact that he's gotten it completely backwards and makes names destiny. It's just an example, Dubner, of how you and I, we can do whatever we want, but nobody cares in the end. People will read it, they'll talk about it, they'll say how great it is, and then they just do the opposite.

• 49:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what Levitt is talking about is the Freakonomics documentary that came out a couple of years ago. It was made by a bunch of different directors, each of them focusing on a different chapter of the book. Morgan Spurlock did the chapter about names. Now, as you just heard Levitt say, the film version seemed to come to some different conclusions than the book. So we called up Morgan, full name Morgan Valentine Spurlock, by the way, to get his take.

• 50:20Speaker 14

  I have to disagree with Dr. Levitt here because what we started to find in the course of making the film is that, you know, names can make a difference. And even though data starts to show you that ultimately, at the end of the day, for most people, it doesn't at all, people are still going to do what ultimately they believe is going to be best for their child. And it may work in the end, most of the time it doesn't, but that's never going to stop someone from believing that the one name that they give their kid is going to put that kid in a better place down the road. Because, you know, we all like to believe that our kids are somehow more special. No matter what's happened in the past, no matter what historically has been proven, that, you know, somehow, our one kid is going to be the one that breaks out from what everyone else has had happen to them in the past.

• 51:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  One thing that most of us probably can agree on, just about every parent thinks that his or her kid is special on some level. And part of what makes each of our kids special is the names we give them. But from what we can tell, your name is not your destiny. Even if your name is Destiny, or Esme, or Archimedes, or Kurt, it is true that your name may tell the world something, maybe even something fairly significant, about your parents' religious or ethnic background, their level of income or education, maybe

• 51:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  even their politics. But just think about it for a minute. Think about all the things that make you you. Your intelligence, your taste, your health, your work ethic, and morals, and decision-making, to say nothing of luck. Now, considering all of those heavyweight forces, how much could something as superficial as a name really affect your life's outcome? Plus which, if you really think your name is holding you back, it isn't that hard to change it. You remember the Conley family? The dad is Dalton, he's the sociologist at NYU, and he named his kids Yo and E. They have thought about names more than any other

• 52:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  family I know, so I figured they'd be good people to ask about this.

• 52:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you one last thing. So my name is extremely boring, Steven. There are a lot of people my age named Steve or Steven. I meet them all the time. And honestly, it's kind of a letdown. It's like you meet someone new and you kind of want them to be something interesting. And it's like, oh, you're Steve also.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  You don't feel some camaraderie or that you're a member of a club?

• 52:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Zero. Less than that. I'm the member of a club that I don't want to belong to. It's just, you know, it's just, it's just like boring. So, but I don't have the courage or whatever to give myself a new name. So, since you guys are so good at having a lot of names and giving yourself alternatives, can you give me a name? Can you rename me?

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Eyelash.

• 53:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Perfect.

• 53:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Signing off for Freakonomics Radio, this is Eyelash Dubner. Thank you for joining us, E, Yo, and Dalton.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 53:34Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 53:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Catherine Wells. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, David Herman, Borey Lamb, and Chris Bannon. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. And a special thanks goes out to you, our readers and listeners, for sharing your unusual names with us. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 54:45Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 55:16Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 56:15Speaker 16

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