Freakonomics
Chapter 6
Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?
Obsessive or not, any parent wants to believe that she is making a big
difference in the kind of person her child turns out to be. Otherwise,
why bother?
The belief in parental power is manifest in the first official act a
parent commits: giving the baby a name. As any modern parent
knows, the baby-naming industry is booming, as evidenced by a proliferation
of books, websites, and baby-name consultants. Many parents
seem to believe that a child cannot prosper unless it is hitched to
the right name; names are seen to carry great aesthetic or even predictive
powers.
This might explain why, in 1958, a New York City man named
Robert Lane decided to call his baby son Winner. The Lanes, who
lived in a housing project in Harlem, already had several children,
each with a fairly typical name. But this boy—well, Robert Lane apparently
had a special feeling about this one. Winner Lane: how could
he fail with a name like that?
Three years later, the Lanes had another baby boy, their seventh and
last child. For reasons that no one can quite pin down today, Robert decided
to name this boy Loser. It doesn’t appear that Robert was unhappy
about the new baby; he just seemed to get a kick out of the
name’s bookend effect. First a Winner, now a Loser. But if Winner Lane
could hardly be expected to fail, could Loser Lane possibly succeed?
Loser Lane did in fact succeed. He went to prep school on a scholarship,
graduated from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and joined
the New York Police Department (this was his mother’s longtime
wish), where he made detective and, eventually, sergeant. Although
he never hid his name, many people were uncomfortable using it. “So
I have a bunch of names,” he says today, “from Jimmy to James to
whatever they want to call you. Timmy. But they rarely call you
Loser.” Once in a while, he said, “they throw a French twist on it:
‘Losier.’ ” To his police colleagues, he is known as Lou.
And what of his brother with the can’t-miss name? The most noteworthy
achievement of Winner Lane, now in his midforties, is the
sheer length of his criminal record: nearly three dozen arrests for
burglary, domestic violence, trespassing, resisting arrest, and other
mayhem.
These days, Loser and Winner barely speak. The father who
named them is no longer alive. Clearly he had the right idea—that
naming is destiny—but he must have gotten the boys mixed up.
Then there is the recent case of Temptress, a fifteen-year-old girl
whose misdeeds landed her in Albany County Family Court in New
York. The judge, W. Dennis Duggan, had long taken note of the
strange names borne by some offenders. One teenage boy, Amcher,
had been named for the first thing his parents saw upon reaching the
hospital: the sign for Albany Medical Center Hospital Emergency
Room. But Duggan considered Temptress the most outrageous name
he had come across.
“I sent her out of the courtroom so I could talk to her mother
about why she named her daughter Temptress,” the judge later recalled.
“She said she was watching The Cosby Show and liked the
young actress. I told her the actress’s name was actually Tempestt Bledsoe.
She said she found that out later, that they had misspelled the
name. I asked her if she knew what ‘temptress’ meant, and she said she
also found that out at some later point. Her daughter was charged
with ungovernable behavior, which included bringing men into the
home while the mother was at work. I asked the mother if she had
ever thought the daughter was living out her name. Most all of this
went completely over her head.”
Was Temptress actually “living out her name,” as Judge Duggan
saw it? Or would she have wound up in trouble even if her mother
had called her Chastity? *
It isn’t much of a stretch to assume that Temptress didn’t have ideal
parents. Not only was her mother willing to name her Temptress in
the first place, but she wasn’t smart enough to know what that word
even meant. Nor is it so surprising, on some level, that a boy named
Amcher would end up in family court. People who can’t be bothered
to come up with a name for their child aren’t likely to be the best parents
either.
So does the name you give your child affect his life? Or is it your life
reflected in his name? In either case, what kind of signal does a child’s
name send to the world—and most important, does it really matter?
As it happens, Loser and Winner, Temptress and Amcher were all
black. Is this fact merely a curiosity or does it have something larger to
say about names and culture?
* See note p. 227.
Every generation seems to produce a few marquee academics who
advance the thinking on black culture. Roland G. Fryer Jr., the young
black economist who analyzed the “acting white” phenomenon and
the black-white test score gap, may be among the next. His ascension
has been unlikely. An indifferent high-school student from an unstable
family, he went to the University of Texas at Arlington on an
athletic scholarship. Two things happened to him during college: he
quickly realized he would never make the NFL or the NBA; and, taking
his studies seriously for the first time in his life, he found he
liked them. After graduate work at Penn State and the University of
Chicago, he was hired as a Harvard professor at age twenty-five. His
reputation for candid thinking on race was already well established.
Fryer’s mission is the study of black underachievement. “One
could rattle off all the statistics about blacks not doing so well,” he
says. “You can look at the black-white differential in out-of-wedlock
births or infant mortality or life expectancy. Blacks are the worst-
performing ethnic group on SATs. Blacks earn less than whites. They
are still just not doing well, period. I basically want to figure out
where blacks went wrong, and I want to devote my life to this.”
In addition to economic and social disparity between blacks and
whites, Fryer had become intrigued by the virtual segregation of culture.
Blacks and whites watch different television shows. (Monday
Night Football is the only show that typically appears on each group’s
top ten list; Seinfeld, one of the most popular sitcoms in history, never
ranked in the top fifty among blacks.) They smoke different cigarettes.
(Newports enjoy a 75 percent market share among black teenagers
versus 12 percent among whites; the white teenagers are mainly
smoking Marlboros.) And black parents give their children names
that are starkly different from white children’s.
Fryer came to wonder: is distinctive black culture a cause of the
economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection
of it?
As with the ECLS study, Fryer went looking for the answer in a
mountain of data: birth-certificate information for every child born
in California since 1961. The data, covering more than sixteen million
births, included standard items such as name, gender, race, birth-
weight, and the parents’ marital status, as well as more telling factors
about the parents: their zip code (which indicates socioeconomic status
and a neighborhood’s racial composition), their means of paying
the hospital bill (again, an economic indicator), and their level of education.
The California data prove just how dissimilarly black and white
parents name their children. White and Asian-American parents,
meanwhile, give their children remarkably similar names; there is
some disparity between white and Hispanic-American parents, but it
is slim compared to the black-white naming gap.
The data also show the black-white gap to be a recent phenomenon.
Until the early 1970s, there was a great overlap between black
and white names. The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood
in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks
than whites. By 1980 she received a name that was twenty times more
common among blacks. (Boys’ names moved in the same direction
but less aggressively—probably because parents of all races are less adventurous
with boys’ names than girls’.) Given the location and timing
of this change—dense urban areas where Afro-American activism
was gathering strength—the most likely cause of the explosion in distinctively
black names was the Black Power movement, which sought
to accentuate African culture and fight claims of black inferiority. If
this naming revolution was indeed inspired by Black Power, it would
be one of the movement’s most enduring remnants. Afros today are
rare, dashikis even rarer; Black Panther founder Bobby Seale is best
known today for peddling a line of barbecue products.
A great many black names today are unique to blacks. More than
40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive
a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received
that year. Even more remarkably, nearly 30 percent of the black girls
are given a name that is unique among every baby, white and black,
born that year in California. (There were also 228 babies named
Unique during the 1990s alone, and 1 each of Uneek, Uneque, and
Uneqqee.) Even among very popular black names, there is little overlap
with whites. Of the 626 baby girls named Deja in the 1990s, 591
were black. Of the 454 girls named Precious, 431 were black. Of the
318 Shanices, 310 were black.
What kind of parent is most likely to give a child such a distinctively
black name? The data offer a clear answer: an unmarried, low-
income, undereducated teenage mother from a black neighborhood
who has a distinctively black name herself. In Fryer’s view, giving a
child a superblack name is a black parent’s signal of solidarity with the
community. “If I start naming my kid Madison,” he says, “you might
think, ‘Oh, you want to go live across the railroad tracks, don’t you?’ ”
If black kids who study calculus and ballet are thought to be “acting
white,” Fryer says, then mothers who call their babies Shanice are
simply “acting black.”
The California study shows that many white parents send as
strong a signal in the opposite direction. More than 40 percent of the
white babies are given names that are at least four times more common
among whites. Consider Connor and Cody, Emily and Abigail.
In one recent ten-year stretch, each of these names was given to at
least two thousand babies in California—fewer than 2 percent of
them black.
So what are the “whitest” names and the “blackest” names?
The Twenty “Whitest” Girl Names
1. Molly 3. Claire
2. Amy4. Emily
5. Katie 13. Katherine
6. Madeline 14. Caitlin
7. Katelyn 15. Kaitlin
8. Emma 16. Holly
9. Abigail 17. Allison
10. Carly 18. Kaitlyn
11. Jenna 19. Hannah
12. Heather 20. Kathryn
The Twenty “Blackest” Girl Names
1. Imani 11. Jada
2. Ebony 12. Tierra
3. Shanice 13. Tiara
4. Aaliyah 14. Kiara
5. Precious 15. Jazmine
6. Nia 16. Jasmin
7. Deja 17. Jazmin
8. Diamond 18. Jasmine
9. Asia 19. Alexus
10. Aliyah 20. Raven
The Twenty “Whitest” Boy Names
1. Jake 9. Scott
2. Connor 10. Logan
3. Tanner 11. Cole
4. Wyatt 12. Lucas
5. Cody 13. Bradley
6. Dustin 14. Jacob
7. Luke 15. Garrett
8. Jack 16. Dylan
185
17. Maxwell 19. Brett
18. Hunter 20. Colin
The Twenty “Blackest” Boy Names
1. DeShawn 11. Demetrius
2. DeAndre 12. Reginald
3. Marquis 13. Jamal
4. Darnell 14. Maurice
5. Terrell 15. Jalen
6. Malik 16. Darius
7. Trevon 17. Xavier
8. Tyrone 18. Terrance
9. Willie 19. Andre
10. Dominique 20. Darryl
So how does it matter if you have a very white name or a very black
name? Over the years, a series of “audit studies” have tried to measure
how people perceive different names. In a typical audit study, a researcher
would send two identical (and fake) résumés, one with a
traditionally white name and the other with an immigrant or
minority-sounding name, to potential employers. The “white” résumés
have always gleaned more job interviews.
According to such a study, if DeShawn Williams and Jake
Williams sent identical résumés to the same employer, Jake Williams
would be more likely to get a callback. The implication is that black-
sounding names carry an economic penalty. Such studies are tantalizing
but severely limited, for they can’t explain why DeShawn didn’t
get the call. Was he rejected because the employer is a racist and is
convinced that DeShawn Williams is black? Or did he reject him because
“DeShawn” sounds like someone from a low-income, low
education family? A résumé is a fairly undependable set of clues—a
recent study showed that more than 50 percent of them contain
lies—so “DeShawn” may simply signal a disadvantaged background
to an employer who believes that workers from such backgrounds are
undependable.
Nor do the black-white audit studies predict what might have happened
in a job interview. What if the employer is racist, and if he unwittingly
agreed to interview a black person who happened to have a
white-sounding name—would he be any more likely to hire the black
applicant after meeting face-to-face? Or is the interview a painful and
discouraging waste of time for the black applicant—that is, an economic
penalty for having a white-sounding name? Along those same
lines, perhaps a black person with a white name pays an economic
penalty in the black community; and what of the potential advantage
to be gained in the black community by having a distinctively black
name? But because the audit studies can’t measure the actual life outcomes
of the fictitious DeShawn Williams versus Jake Williams, they
can’t assess the broader impact of a distinctively black name.
Maybe DeShawn should just change his name.
People do this all the time, of course. The clerks in New York City’s
civil court recently reported that name changes are at an all-time high.
Some of the changes are purely, if bizarrely, aesthetic. A young couple
named Natalie Jeremijenko and Dalton Conley recently renamed
their four-year-old son Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander
Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley. Some people change names
for economic purposes: after a New York livery-cab driver named
Michael Goldberg was shot in early 2004, it was reported that Mr.
Goldberg was in fact an Indian-born Sikh who thought it advantageous
to take a Jewish name upon immigrating to New York. Gold-
berg’s decision might have puzzled some people in show business
circles, where it is a time-honored tradition to change Jewish names.
Thus did Issur Danielovitch become Kirk Douglas; thus did the
William Morris Agency rise to prominence under its namesake, the
former Zelman Moses.
The question is, would Zelman Moses have done as well had he
not become William Morris? And would DeShawn Williams do any
better if he called himself Jake Williams or Connor Williams? It is
tempting to think so—just as it is tempting to think that a truckload
of children’s books will make a child smarter.
Though the audit studies can’t be used to truly measure how much
a name matters, the California names data can.
How? The California data included not only each baby’s vital statistics
but information about the mother’s level of education, income
and, most significantly, her own date of birth. This last fact made it
possible to identify the hundreds of thousands of California mothers
who had themselves been born in California and then to link them to
their own birth records. Now a new and extremely potent story
emerged from the data: it was possible to track the life outcome of any
individual woman. This is the sort of data chain that researchers
dream about, making it possible to identify a set of children who were
born under similar circumstances, then locate them again twenty or
thirty years later to see how they turned out. Among the hundreds of
thousands of such women in the California data, many bore distinctively
black names and many others did not. Using regression analysis
to control for other factors that might influence life trajectories, it was
then possible to measure the impact of a single factor—in this case, a
woman’s first name—on her educational, income, and health outcomes.
So does a name matter?
The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively
black name—whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named
DeShawn—does have a worse life outcome than a woman named
Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn’t the fault of their names. If two
black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the
same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances,
they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of
parents who name their son Jake don’t tend to live in the same neighborhoods
or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents
who name their son DeShawn. And that’s why, on average, a boy
named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education
than a boy named DeShawn. A DeShawn is more likely to have been
handicapped by a low-income, low-education, single-parent background.
His name is an indicator—not a cause—of his outcome. Just
as a child with no books in his home isn’t likely to test well in school,
a boy named DeShawn isn’t likely to do as well in life.
And what if DeShawn had changed his name to Jake or Connor:
would his situation improve? Here’s a guess: anybody who bothers to
change his name in the name of economic success is—like the high-
school freshmen in Chicago who entered the school-choice lottery—
at least highly motivated, and motivation is probably a stronger
indicator of success than, well, a name.
Just as the ECLS data answered questions about parenting that went
well beyond the black-white test gap, the California names data tell a
lot of stories in addition to the one about distinctively black names.
Broadly speaking, the data tell us how parents see themselves—and,
more significantly, what kind of expectations they have for their children.
Here’s a question to begin with: where does a name come from,
anyway? Not, that is, the actual source of the name—that much is
usually obvious: there’s the Bible, there’s the huge cluster of traditional
English and Germanic and Italian and French names, there are
princess names and hippie names, nostalgic names and place names.
Increasingly, there are brand names (Lexus, Armani, Bacardi, Timberland)
and what might be called aspirational names. The California
data show eight Harvards born during the 1990s (all of them black),
fifteen Yales (all white), and eighteen Princetons (all black). There
were no Doctors but three Lawyers (all black), nine Judges (eight of
them white), three Senators (all white), and two Presidents (both
black). Then there are the invented names. Roland G. Fryer Jr., while
discussing his names research on a radio show, took a call from a black
woman who was upset with the name just given to her baby niece. It
was pronounced shuh-TEED but was in fact spelled “Shithead.” Or
consider the twin boys OrangeJello and LemonJello, also black,
whose parents further dignified their choice by instituting the pronunciations
a-RON-zhello and le-MON-zhello.
OrangeJello, LemonJello, and Shithead have yet to catch on
among the masses, but other names do. How does a name migrate
through the population, and why? Is it purely a matter of zeitgeist, or
is there some sensible explanation? We all know that names rise and
fall and rise—witness the return of Sophie and Max from near extinc-
tion—but is there a discernible pattern to these movements?
The answer lies in the California data, and the answer is yes.
Among the most interesting revelations in the data is the correlation
between a baby’s name and the parent’s socioeconomic status.
Consider the most common female names found in middle-income
white households versus low-income white households. (These and
other lists to follow include data from the 1990s alone, to ensure a
large sample that is also current.)
Most Common Middle-Income White Girl Names
1. Sarah 3. Jessica
2. Emily 4. Lauren
5. Ashley 13. Elizabeth
6. Amanda 14. Katherine
7. Megan 15. Madison
8. Samantha 16. Jennifer
9. Hannah 17. Alexandra
10. Rachel 18. Brittany
11. Nicole 19. Danielle
12. Taylor 20. Rebecca
Most Common Low-Income White Girl Names
1. Ashley11. Emily
2. Jessica 12. Nicole
3. Amanda13. Elizabeth
4. Samantha 14. Heather
5. Brittany 15. Alyssa
6. Sarah 16. Stephanie
7. Kayla17. Jennifer
8. Amber18. Hannah
9. Megan 19. Courtney
10. Taylor 20. Rebecca
There is considerable overlap, to be sure. But keep in mind that
these are the most common names of all, and consider the size of the
data set. The difference between consecutive positions on these lists
may represent several hundred or even several thousand children. So
if Brittany is number five on the low-income list and number eighteen
on the middle-income list, you can be assured that Brittany is a decidedly
low-end name. Other examples are even more pronounced. Five
names in each category don’t appear at all in the other category’s top
twenty. Here are the top five names among high-end and low-end
families, in order of their relative disparity with the other category:
Most Common High-End White Girl Names
1. Alexandra
2. Lauren
3. Katherine
4. Madison
5. Rachel
Most Common Low-End White Girl Names
1. Amber
2. Heather
3. Kayla
4. Stephanie
5. Alyssa
And for the boys:
Most Common High-End White Boy Names
1. Benjamin
2. Samuel
3. Jonathan
4. Alexander
5. Andrew
Most Common Low-End White Boy Names
1. Cody
2. Brandon
3. Anthony
4. Justin
5. Robert
Considering the relationship between income and names, and
given the fact that income and education are strongly correlated, it is
not surprising to find a similarly strong link between the parents’ level
of education and the name they give their baby. Once again drawing
from the pool of most common names among white children, here
are the top picks of highly educated parents versus those with the least
education:
Most Common White Girl Names Among High-Education Parents
1. Katherine
2. Emma
3. Alexandra
4. Julia
5. Rachel
Most Common White Girl Names Among Low-Education Parents
1. Kayla
2. Amber
3. Heather
4. Brittany
5. Brianna
Most Common White Boy Names Among High-Education Parents
1. Benjamin
2. Samuel
3. Alexander
4. John
5. William
Most Common White Boy Names Among Low-Education Parents
1. Cody
2. Travis
3. Brandon
4. Justin
5. Tyler
The effect is even more pronounced when the sample is widened
beyond the most common names. Drawing from the entire California
database, here are the names that signify the most poorly educated
white parents.
The Twenty White Girl Names
That Best Signify Low-Education Parents*
(Average number of years of mother’s education in parentheses)
1. Angel (11.38) 11. Jazmine (11.94)
2. Heaven (11.46) 12. Shyanne (11.96)
3. Misty (11.61) 13. Britany (12.05)
4. Destiny (11.66) 14. Mercedes (12.06)
5. Brenda (11.71) 15. Tiffanie (12.08)
6. Tabatha (11.81) 16. Ashly (12.11)
7. Bobbie (11.87) 17. Tonya (12.13)
8. Brandy (11.89) 18. Crystal (12.15)
9. Destinee (11.91) 19. Brandie (12.16)
10. Cindy (11.92) 20. Brandi (12.17)
* With a minimum of 100 occurrences
If you or someone you love is named Cindy or Brenda and is over,
say, forty, and feels that those names did not formerly connote a low-
education family, you are right. These names, like many others, have
shifted hard and fast of late. Some of the other low-education names
are obviously misspellings, whether intentional or not, of more standard
names. In most cases the standard spellings of the names—
Tabitha, Cheyenne, Tiffany, Brittany, and Jasmine—also signify low
education. But the various spellings of even one name can reveal a
strong disparity:
Ten “Jasmines” in Ascending Order of Maternal Education
(Years of mother’s education in parentheses)
1. Jazmine (11.94)
2. Jazmyne (12.08)
3. Jazzmin (12.14)
4. Jazzmine (12.16)
5. Jasmyne (12.18)
6. Jasmina (12.50)
7. Jazmyn (12.77)
8. Jasmine (12.88)
9. Jasmin (13.12)
10. Jasmyn (13.23)
Here is the list of low-education white boy names. It includes the
occasional misspelling (Micheal and Tylor), but more common is the
nickname-as-proper-name trend.
The Twenty White Boy Names
That Best Signify Low-Education Parents*
(Years of mother’s education in parentheses)
1. Ricky (11.55) 11. Tommy (11.89)
2. Joey (11.65) 12. Tony (11.96)
3. Jessie (11.66) 13. Micheal (11.98)
4. Jimmy (11.66) 14. Ronnie (12.03)
5. Billy (11.69) 15. Randy (12.07)
6. Bobby (11.74) 16. Jerry (12.08)
7. Johnny (11.75) 17. Tylor (12.14)
8. Larry (11.80) 18. Terry (12.15)
9. Edgar (11.81) 19. Danny (12.17)
10. Steve (11.84) 20. Harley (12.22)
* With a minimum of 100 occurrences
Now for the names that signify the highest level of parental education.
These names don’t have much in common, phonetically or aesthetically,
with the low-education names. The girls’ names are in most
regards diverse, though with a fair share of literary and otherwise artful
touches. A caution to prospective parents who are shopping for a
“smart” name: remember that such a name won’t make your child
smart; it will, however, give her the same name as other smart kids—
at least for a while. (For a much longer and more varied list of girls’
and boys’ names, see p. 227)
The Twenty White Girl Names
That Best Signify High-Education Parents *
(Years of mother’s education in parentheses)
1. Lucienne (16.60) 11. Rotem (16.08)
2. Marie-Claire (16.50) 12. Oona (16.00)
3. Glynnis (16.40) 13. Atara (16.00)
4. Adair (16.36) 14. Linden (15.94)
5. Meira (16.27) 15. Waverly (15.93)
6. Beatrix (16.26) 16. Zofia (15.88)
7. Clementine (16.23) 17. Pascale (15.82)
8. Philippa (16.21) 18. Eleanora (15.80)
9. Aviva (16.18) 19. Elika (15.80)
10. Flannery (16.10) 20. Neeka (15.77)
* With a minimum of 10 occurrences
Now for the boys’ names that are turning up these days in high-
education households. This list is particularly heavy on the Hebrew,
with a noticeable trend toward Irish traditionalism.
The Twenty White Boy Names
That Best Signify High-Education Parents *
(Years of mother’s education in parentheses)
1. Dov (16.50) 6. Guillaume (16.17)
2. Akiva (16.42) 7. Elon (16.16)
3. Sander (16.29) 8. Ansel (16.14)
4. Yannick (16.20) 9. Yonah (16.14)
5. Sacha (16.18) 10. Tor (16.13)
197
11. Finnegan (16.13) 16. Kia (15.90)
12. MacGregor (16.10) 17. Ashkon (15.84)
13. Florian (15.94) 18. Harper (15.83)
14. Zev (15.92) 19. Sumner (15.77)
15. Beckett (15.91) 20. Calder (15.75)
* With a minimum of 10 occurrences
If many names on the above lists were unfamiliar to you, don’t feel
bad. Even boys’ names—which have always been scarcer than girls’—
have been proliferating wildly. This means that even the most popular
names today are less popular than they used to be. Consider the ten
most popular names given to black baby boys in California in 1990
and then in 2000. The top ten in 1990 includes 3,375 babies (18.7
percent of those born that year), while the top ten in 2000 includes
only 2,115 (14.6 percent of those born that year).
Most Popular Black Boy Names
(Number of occurrences in parentheses)
1990 2000
1. Michael (532) 1. Isaiah (308)
2. Christopher (531) 2. Jordan (267)
3. Anthony (395) 3. Elijah (262)
4. Brandon (323) 4. Michael (235)
5. James (303) 5. Joshua (218)
6. Joshua (301) 6. Anthony (208)
7. Robert (276) 7. Christopher (169)
8. David (243) 8. Jalen (159)
9. Kevin (240) 9. Brandon (148)
10. Justin (231) 10. Justin (141)
In the space of ten years, even the most popular name among black
baby boys (532 occurrences for Michael) became far less popular (308
occurrences for Isaiah). So parents are plainly getting more diverse
with names. But there’s another noteworthy shift in these lists: a very
quick rate of turnover. Note that four of the 1990 names (James,
Robert, David, and Kevin) fell out of the top ten by 2000. Granted,
they made up the bottom half of the 1990 list. But the names that replaced
them in 2000 weren’t bottom dwellers. Three of the new
names—Isaiah, Jordan, and Elijah—were in fact numbers one, two,
and three in 2000. For an even more drastic example of how quickly
and thoroughly a name can cycle in and out of use, consider the ten
most popular names given to white girls in California in 1960 and
then in 2000.
Most Popular White Girl Names
1960 2000
1. Susan 1. Emily
2. Lisa 2. Hannah
3. Karen 3. Madison
4. Mary 4. Sarah
5. Cynthia 5. Samantha
6. Deborah 6. Lauren
7. Linda 7. Ashley
8. Patricia 8. Emma
9. Debra 9. Taylor
10. Sandra 10. Megan
Not a single name from 1960 remains in the top ten. But, you say,
it’s hard to stay popular for forty years. So how about comparing
today’s most popular names with the top ten from only twenty years
earlier?
Most Popular White Girl Names
1980 2000
1. Jennifer 1. Emily
2. Sarah 2. Hannah
3. Melissa 3. Madison
4. Jessica 4. Sarah
5. Christina 5. Samantha
6. Amanda 6. Lauren
7. Nicole 7. Ashley
8. Michelle 8. Emma
9. Heather 9. Taylor
10. Amber 10. Megan
A single holdover: Sarah. So where do these Emilys and Emmas
and Laurens all come from? Where on earth did Madison come from?
It’s easy enough to see that new names become very popular very
fast—but why?
Let’s take another look at a pair of earlier lists. Here are the most
popular names given to baby girls in the 1990s among low-income
families and among families of middle income or higher.
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 “low-
end” 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 spell
ing 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 Isabel
Ansley Kate
Ava Lara
Avery Linden
Aviva Maeve
Clementine Marie-Claire
Eleanor Maya
Ella Philippa
Emma Phoebe
Fiona Quinn
Flannery Sophie
Grace Waverly
Most Popular Boys’ Names of 2015?
Aidan Asher
Aldo Beckett
Anderson Bennett
Ansel Carter
Cooper Maximilian
Finnegan McGregor
Harper Oliver
Jackson Reagan
Johan Sander
Keyon Sumner
Liam 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.