Freakonomics Radio
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?
It’s hard to measure something like the effect of a name. But Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt 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.
“I think it really is about the parents,” Levitt says. “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 that they want to be.”
On this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, we brought back a classic. It’s called “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” and it’s about whether who you are, and who you turn out to be, may be related to what you’re called when you’re born.
Beginning in the 1970s, at the height of the Black Power movement, African Americans started giving their children very different names than white Americans. (In the decades immediately prior to that, black and white Americans had typically given their children similar names.) Some years back, Levitt…
