What's In a Name?

This journal entry has two parts. Address each part in your response. After reading Freakonomics chapter 6 (“Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?), answer the following:

1. According to the authors, does a child’s name matter when it comes to the child’s potential for economic success? What do their analyses reveal? What are their conclusions? State them precisely.
2. Considering your own first name (if you wish, you need not mention it in the blog post), do you agree with their findings? Does your experience validate their conclusions?



1. A child's name is a good statistical indicator of a child's future success because different types of people (rich people, poor people, educated people, and otherwise) have very different tastes in names. Also, since names often come to be associated with certain types of people, they are often used to put people in the categories associated with their names. For this reason it can be hard for someone with a black-sounding name to get a job regardless of his actual race, and a guy named Mohammad might be more likely to be "randomly" searched than most other people, even if he's not even Muslim.
2. Sure. My name didn't appear in any of his lists, but I have always been able to tell quite a bit about people I've met based on each one's reaction to my name - and, conversely, many people I've met have been able to (correctly) type me as a believer based on my name's moderately obscure Biblical origin. Actually, whether or not a person recognizes the name "Josiah" is a fairly good litmus test for how well that person knows the Bible: my namesake's story is obscure enough that most nonchristians have never heard of it but significant enough that most real believers have.

I also laughed out loud when I got to the part about the list of names common among children with highly-educated parents being "heavy on the Hebrew".