Where do baby names come from?

Good names are important. It’s true. Props to Freakonomics for this interesting tidbit. “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, Heather, and Stephanie started out as high-end names. For every high-end baby given those names, however, another five lower-income girls received those names within 10 years.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 10:28 am and is filed under asides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 1 Comment

susan 11/16/2005 02:33 PM 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Have you ever read the Baby Name Wizard blog (http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog/index.html)? It's by a lady who writes baby name books. She also has this application thingy that charts the popularity of different names over time on a graph (http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv01...) that is interesting to play around with.

Anyways, she talks about this kind of stuff a lot. For whatever reason I find the whole subject really fascinating, and maybe you would too. I wonder what she would make about the statement you mentioned. A lot of times, when there's some theory in the news, she ends up poking holes in it (e.g. here: http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog/2005/06/quic...).

reply edit reblog flag record video comment

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

Letter Never Sent