Freakonomics Page #2

What happened to Temptress has NOTHING

to do with her name, has everything to do with where she grew up

It turns out, Temptress grew up in a poor black neighborhood

The kind of neighborhood Dr. Fryer has been studying for years

As a world leading renowned economist and an leading expert on race in America

Fryer has been long been interested in what he calls

Cultural Segregation

The gap between White Culture and Black Culture

One embodiment of that culture is

what you name your kid

is probably one of the few cultural items that we can really measure

precisely

What we did was we looked at the effects of your kid's first name

on their life outcomes

Dr. Fryer analyzed the naming records of every baby born in the states of California

over the last forty years

and those names tell an unmistakable story

African American parents are more likely than any other ethnic group

to give their children unique names

There is definitely a distinction between names ...

... for white people and names for black people

Black names will be Molique, JAQuan, NayShan, Naheem

-TaSha and Shamika -Shaniqua and NaShan and KayShan

I know this girl, her name is "treasure", TREZURE

struck me as typically that's more like an african american name

I like the names that begin with SHA, like Shaheem, Shahee, Shamur

Shakeem, ShaKoor

You know - Oprah. It's popular

It was actually in the fifties

and the early sisties that we saw

huge overlaps in the naming patterns of blacks and whites

So people name their kids John and Michael

and names like that

And what you saw was around 19 ... in the 1968 or so

kind of the black power movement actually

you saw distinct biofabrication

with black names getting more disctinctively black

and a lot of them are islamic names

Because the black power movement is about identity - who are we?

Who are you? Are you part of us?

It wasn't until the late 80s and 90s that we started to get

you know, kind of the ... made up, concatenated names

that you see now

This is generation today, they saw the change the whole name change concept

they have names that are 30 letters long you know

Everybody try to do something, um ... how do you say, unique

they try to name their kids over something different you know

We had 228 unique versions of the name "Unique"

Again, my favorite was ...

UNEQQEE:

another one of my favorite was

UNEEK:

ah ... so there are a lot of people trying to be unique

So what happened to all these uniquely named kids?

Kids like poor little temptress

I think it's not the name that's doing the damage to temptress

It's that they grow up in the type of situation

where someone would name their kids Temptress

The person would actually names their kids that

probably has a host of other issues

that are influcing their kids' lifetime outcomes

Not just the name itself

What kinds of issues?

Let's look at a boy with the most studied white name

and a boy with the most studied african american name

The person who gives their kid a distinctively biased name

on average is more likely

to live in poverty

and to be kind of on the lower wrongs of the socio-economic ladder

You see, this is where Jake lives

and this is where Deshawn lives

The schools are not functiong - the teachers in those shcools aren't the same quality

as would be in Jake's neighborhood

In those neighborhoods, 80% of the households are female headed only

and what we found is that, names don't matter so much

they type of mother you have, the type of family you have

the type of community you grow up in

those things matter a lot

but what they name you, just doesn't matter

So name doesn't define your destiny?

Maybe if you name someone destiny, I don't know

But ... No. I mean your name doesn't define your desinty

A name may not define your destiny

But it can dictate the ways other people perceive you

Meet Harvard professor Dr. Sendhil Mullainathan

I'm very familiar with Roland Fryer's work

We both worked on the impact of names

I think Roland has emphasized that

people who choose names that are very black are different

from other people that choose names that are not very black

whereas, we emphasize that holding everything else cosntant

that people who end up with very black names are treated very differently

We know that in the data African Americans earn a lot less

We are interested in how much of that earning less

is simply they find it harder to get a job

are all African Americans treated very differently in the labor market than whites

Dr. Mullaninathan conducted his own study

This time in Boston and Chicago

What we did is we made up 5,000 resumes

Half of them we put an African American name, half of them we put a White name

Otherwise, the resumes were the same. And we send them out

And we said, which gets callback more?

What we found was that the same resume when it had an African American name

was about 33% less likely to get an interview than it had a white name

It means that, if a White person searching for jobs for 10 weeks

an equivalent skilled African American will search for 15 weeks

and those are 5 long weeks if you were unemployed

You can judge somebody by their names

It's not right, but people do it

They assume that, just because your name is Monique

or your name is LaVongue,or Shenanig, or that

that you're African American and you are not qualified because

your name has an ethnicity to it.

One time, there was a girl name LaKeisha talked on the phone

and I thought she was black but when I met her I was totally shocked that

she was a white southern girl

When I picture LaShandra, yea she's black

The names we used in our studies were names like Lakisha, Jamal, Tyrone

Based on the results, it raises a question

I'm an African American parent, I'm thinking naming my child

Tyrone sounds like a very good name, I might have a grand father named Tyrone

Should I name my child Tyrone?

Yes, name your kid Tyrone, you've made it harder for him in the labor market

On the other hand, should you give in to that?

Should I give in to the prevailing norm, or should I express my individuality?

as I want

It's a bit of an ethical quandary

My friend got a drug dealer named Tyrone and I assume it's a black guy

Todd is a white name, Tyrone is a black name

I mean that's sort of how it goes, right?

You might choose a distinctively black name

as a way to signal something about yourself

and about your commitment to the black community

and that's the way to show other

African Americans look I am really black

and I think there're distinctively black names already tell you

that there's a cultrual divide at some core, visible, noticeable level

and we see it sometimes in clothings, we see it in names

and in fact that's true, there're quite a few distinctively white names

names like Emily, Brandon, ... ah ...

... forgetting what those ... if you give me a minute I can count the others

White names are like Sarah, Megan

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