Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

Expectant parents spend literally months reading endless published Baby Name lists and having fraught conversations about the forename they will give their infant.  It's one of the ever-present banes of (other people's) pregnancy in my opinion but then I've never been very imaginative.

I've been reading a research paper written by economists S. Levitt and R. G. Fryer Jr. and expanded to a chapter in the very entertaining and fascinating 'Freakonomics' by Levitt and Dubner.  The paper looks at the gulf between black and white culture in the USA.  One very noticeable difference in cultural indicators is that black parents give their children names that are starkly different to those given to white children. (and of course vice versa).  The paper: The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names is summarised below:

This research was based on an extremely large and detailed data source of data: birth registration information for every child born in California since 1961 - more than 16 million births.  It included standard items like name, gender, race, birthweight, and the parents' marital status, as well as more telling factors: the parents' ZIP code (which indicates socioeconomic status and  neighbourhood racial composition), their means of paying the hospital bill for the birth (again, an economic indicator), and their level of education.

The California data establish just how differently black and white parents have named their children over the past 25 years or so  - a side-effect maybe of the Black Power movement. The typical baby girl born in a black neighbourhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than whites.  By 1980, she received a name that was 20 times more common among blacks than whites.  (Boys' names moved in the same direction but less so - parents of all races apparently less adventurous with boys' names than girls'.) 

Today, more than 40% 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% of the black girls are given a name that is unique among every baby, white and black, born that year in California!

The data offer a clear picture of which parents are most likely to give a child such a distinctively black name:  unmarried, low-income, undereducated, teenage mothers from black neighbourhoods who themselves have distinctively black names.  Giving a child a super-black name would seem to be a black parent's signal of solidarity with her community.  White parents, meanwhile, often send as strong a signal in the opposite direction - more than 40% of the white babies are given names that are at least four times more common among whites than blacks.

The California names data offer the opportunity, by subjecting this data to regression analysis, to tease out the effect of any one factor (in this case, a person's first name) on her future education, income, and health.

The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name - whether it is a woman named Precious or a man named DeShawn - does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Emma or a man named Jake.  But it isn't the fault of his or her name.  If two black girls, Uniqque Williams and Claire Williams, are born in the same neighbourhood and into the same family and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of mother who names her daughter Claire doesn't tend to live in the same neighbourhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of mother who names her daughter Uniqque. And that's why, on average, a girl named Claire will tend to earn more money and get more education than a girl named Uniqque.  Parental income and educational level is the prime factor in the child's own eventual socioeconomic position. Uniqque's name is an indicator - but not a cause - of her life path.

In my work I tend to see a lot of forenames of school age children.  Generally, altho I've not compiled my very own data set so this is no more than an anecdotal observation:  the children attending 'good' or 'excellent' schools as judged by Ofsted tend to have very different forenames to those attending 'satisfactory' or 'inadequate' schools.  Jack and Harry, Olivia and Jessica even on those uncommon occasions where they attend the same school are not found in the same academic sets as Jayden and Chokota , Alexus and Madonna - but are most often not found in the same school.  As Levitt and Fryer conclude, it's not the names themselves which account for the difference in life outcomes, but that the names they are given indicate their parents' life position - and parents socio-economic position is the foremost and principal determinant of the child's. 

Having said that when we hear that someone is named Chokota I believe that we form prejudgements about them, about their abilities, habits and expectations - and those prejudgements themselves are an important limiting factor. (Unless of course it happens to be Chokota Beckham in which case we'll assume that they've had the best education money can provide.)  The reverse, imo, is true when we hear a child is named Tristram or Miranda - our expectations of them are set by a prejudgement based on their forename only.

So, imo, whatever our social class it's important that we give our children forenames that at the very least will not prejudice their life chances.  Those interminable hours spent coming up with suggestions and arguing about whether baby is to be a John or a Jodrell actually are absolutely crucial.