An abundance of Katherines: The game theory of baby naming
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
For people unfamiliar with common English names, all of the authors have first names similar to or derived from Katherine.
A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Authors, by Goodman, Goodman, Goodman, and Goodman https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...
(Para)bosons, (para)fermions, quons and other beasts in the menagerie of particle statistics, by O.W. Greenberg, D.M Greenberger, T.V. Greenbergest https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9306225 [Wally Greenberg told me that T.V. stands for 'the very']
Also note that TFA is a 1 April posting.
• Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: implicit egotism and major life decisions (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11999918/)
With follow-ups:
• I sell seashells by the seashore and my name is Jack: comment on Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones (2002) (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14599244/)
• Assessing the validity of implicit egotism: a reply to Gallucci (2003) (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14599245/)
C. Limb, R. Limb, C. Limb, D. Limb "Nominative determinism in hospital medicine: Can our surnames influence our choice of career, and even specialty?"
https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1308/147363515X14...
> Last night, February 3rd 2011, saw 100 students and fellows all sharing the name of Tom, gather together in a record-breaking charity event in Sidney Sussex dining hall. [...] For £20, Cambridge students with the name "Tom, Thomas, Tommy (or another legitimate variation)" were able to attend a black-tie, three-course formal dinner
> For instance, a parent might anticipate the name “Kate” would be a pleasantly traditional yet unique name with only moderate popularity. They would be wrong [6].
Reference 6 is the paper.
> Simon Shindler contributed significantly to the aesthetic of Figure 7, but could not be named an author for obvious reasons.
What are these "obvious reasons"?
/^[KC]at(h?ie|e|h?y|h?erine)$/https://nameberry.com/list/16/catherinekatherines-internatio...
vowel 0: E, Ye, Je, Ai. Optional and rare; Ai in particular is very rare.
consonant 1: C, K, G, Q. Mandatory; G and Q are rare.
vowel 1: a, aa, ai; optional h or gh. Mandatory. A few shortened forms use i instead.
consonant 2: t, tt, d. Almost mandatory, but a few r-centric variants lack it. There also seem to be a few
vowel 2: a, e. Optional, only valid if consonant 2 exists. In shortened forms, also i, ie, or y; this is the end.
consonant 3: r, l. Optional. Sometimes L starts a new word instead.
vowel 3: i, y, ee, ie, ii, e if no consonant 2, plus several rare vowel sequences. Almost mandatory (assuming consonant 3), but a few rare variants pack the r right next to the n.
consonant 4: n, nn, nh. Optional.
vowel 4: e, a, ey. Optional; ey is rare.
Some languages shove an s, c, x, t, k somewhere too (some of these are probably language-specific diminutives, but a few might be phoneme drift instead) ...
"Kaylee" and its variant "Kayla" should probably not be counted (despite almost fitting the pattern) since that's a compound of "Kay", adding the additional "Leigh" name.
I understand that many people from east asia have a given name in their native language and an english sounding name that they often choose themselves.
If those three authors did chose their english names, then they too fall into the same category of parents who chose a variation of Katherine.
I’ve also met some folks who had English names that phonetically sounded similar to their original names. I wonder if there’s an east Asian first name that sounds like any of the versions of Katherine.
English people choosing English baby names often want them to be relatively unique or stand out in some way. At the very least, they don't want them to be _overly_ common.
Manny people I've talked to that have chosen a name after immigrating are kind of aiming for the opposite. They want to fit in. They already feel that they stand out, and generally try and minimize that.
There's also the fact that for some groups, they're choosing the name at a time when they may not be very familiar with English names or culture, and may not have much in the way of local resources they can or feel comfortable with drawing on, so the main indication they have that they haven't chosen some absurd name is "hey, lots of people here are named that".
The USA has a wide variety, but there are also places like Vietnam where only a handful of family names are in common use and more than 30% of people are Nguyens.
For example, Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter is Apple Blythe Alison Martin, and she's stuck with it, being Apple Martin professionally— but it's good she had the off-ramp to be the much more conventional Blythe or Alison if she'd wanted it.
(btw, my son attended the same preschool as Paltrow's kids: just a coincidence worth mentioning.)
Now Ashley is 35 and pushing little Kaylee in the pram, or maybe she’s a business executive — either way, our perception has shifted that “Ashley” is now a woman not a girl. Just like how Gertrude, Beatrice, and Florence are more likely to be playing dolls at the park than bridge at the nursing home.
I wonder how all of these people met and decided to collaborate on this paper.
ie ... this is bollocks.
> Because this paper was written in 2024, we include an obligatory section involving generative AI and LLMs.
> Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier.
> It is well-known that parents are always in complete agreement over the name they would prefer to pick for their newborn child.
(and I appreciate how every so often the subtitles in D5 are off)
I personally loved the semi cropped ChatGPT screen shot in figure 8 that has "Can you write me a paper on the game theory of names".
(Also, the submission date, 31 Mar 2024, suggests that the paper was intended to be published on April Fools Day.)
Nothing is less boring than a name embraced by a small energetic human confident that's who they are.
I imagine you might want a funky name for a toy to convinve yourself - that is a total non-issue for children.
I do think the best names are ones with the most meaning.
You name a kid Isaac, you could be naming him after Isaac Newton. It puts something on to him.
If you name a kid William, maybe you hope he will be the next Shakespeare.
Simply by naming someone something, you imprint something on to them. The history and power of a culture.
Yet for this very reason, especially when people see the culture as dark, they choose unique names, names that say you can be who you want to be.
Though I think I still prefer old names, looking at names of people who have done something, and then hoping to do something similar.
I think this is kind of why a convert to an orthodox Christianity, from some heterodoxy, or atheism, or from the religion of the “infadels” takes a new name in baptism. They hope to live up to whomever. If you take the name Theresa at baptism with a sense of obligation to love the lowly like Mother Theresa and so on.
Wonder if other religions do similar things?
My son's name. I was thinking of Isaac Asimov and I had Isaac Newton in mind as well. I know an SF writer who I worked with who named his sons Arthur and Robert, after famous SF writers obviously in his case.
>LEVITT: Yeah, one of the most predictable patterns when it comes to names is that almost every name that becomes popular starts out as a high-class name or a high-education name. So in these California data we had we could see the education level of the parents. And even the names that eventually become the, quote, “trashiest” kinds of names, so the Tiffanys and the Brittanys, and I’ll probably get myself in trouble, and the Caitlyns and things like that start at the top of the income distribution, and over the course of 20 or 30 or 40 years they migrate their way down, becoming more and more popular among the less-educated set.
What you see with Mabel in the paper is a fad name coming back. Hipsters bring it back, then upper class parents with hipster pretentions popularize it, then it spreads to the general population. The trick is to pick a name that sounds outdated or obscure but will come into popularity within the child's lifetime. If you wanted to do that now, you would pick something like Linda or Iris.
I would also be interested to see analysis on syllable counts. When will the boomer 2 syllable names will come back into style?
[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-much-does-your-name-mat...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Harrison&assumption=%7B...
Compare with a name like Michael ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Michael ), which while it has fallen out of favor with newer names, is still the most common male name in the population - though the average age is 48 years.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1970s.html
And yes, I went to school with seven Jennifers on that bus route (there were more on other bus routes). https://youtu.be/1nN_5kkYR6k
Still, Harrison wasn't even in the top 200 names in the 70s. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1970s.html
Compare with 136 in the 2010s. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names2010s.html
One of the things to take note of between those two charts is that the most popular names are less popular. Parents are choosing distinctive names rather than common names.
In 1970, the top five male names represent 2.5 million births. Michael (the most common name) was 707,377 of them.
In 2010, the most common name was Noah with 183,258 births. In 1970, a name with that much popularity would be #20.5 between Thomas and Timmothy.
That 2.5 million again... in 2010s that's 19 names.
... Another visualization of the data. https://namerology.com/baby-name-grapher/ This looks at the top 200 names for boys and girls over time. However, the downward slope isn't fewer overall births but rather the reduction of popularity of the most common names.
And another visualization of the data - The Evolution of US Boy Names: Bubbled https://youtu.be/WQv99sEPDsw and Girl Names: https://youtu.be/qVh2Qw5KSFg
The thing to watch in those is the size of the largest bubbles. The 2014 bubbles look fundamentally different than the 1974 bubbles.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01655515211018...
> ... we create a model which is not only tractable and clean, but also perfectly captures the real world.
Kudos to the authors for a good sense of humour.
This paper is just filled with hilarious quotes.
I want my child to have a name in the sweet spot. Not too common, not too unique, and, crucially, not a name that is popular for only a brief period so that everyone will know about how old they are just by their given name[0].
But people thinking along these lines inevitably gravitate to the same small handful of names, causing the "too popular for a brief period of time" effect against their will. I've already failed once; my cat is named Olivia, the popular girl's name of the decade, apparently.
[0] My own name is one of those. It's annoying.
Especially given that the hypothetical person in question would get half their DNA from me and be raised by me it seems a pretty reasonable suspicion.
1. Name them what you're going to call them. If you want a "Kate", don't name them "Katherine". If you want a "Sam", don't name them Samuel.
2. Don't give them the same first name as a close relative.
3. Don't give them a unique spelling of a common name. You're just giving them a life-long annoyance of having to spell their name out any time they're telling someone their name vocally.
My parents broke the first two rules when they named me and it created headaches as I transitioned into adulthood. It even caused problems when I interned at Intel, where he'd been working for 15 years. I got e-mails that were supposed to go to him, and vice-versa.
I do prefer full versions for the name instead of shortenings or nicknames. I think it lets them feel freer, earlier, to switch to the full version if they like it better than the nickname or shortened version. More options.
Because American parents these days are a bunch of narcissists.
My parents wanted to name me after my grandparents but they solved this nicely.
My first name is the middle name of one of my grandparents, and my middle name is the first name of another grandparent.
Despite the name it has a pretty large category of real world names. :)
I am being completely sincere. There are thousands of lists of baby names. Classic information overload. A randomizer let you look at ten options and if you don't like those you can get another ten.
> the popular girl's name of the decade, apparently.
Keep in mind, in the internet era it can actually be nice to have a bad-SEO common name (though that's often dependent upon surname too).
This worked so well she later chose a completely unrelated nickname for me.
Almost looks like an April Fools Joke.
> The above model contains several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (ERAs). The first ERA is the very conservative assumption that there is only one gender, with all children and all names adhering to the same gender. Thus any child may be given any name, so long as it exists in the names list1. Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier.
What a weird assumption. We named our daughter picking four names, starting respectively with the letters 'G', 'A', 'T' and 'C'.
may have had a similar experience to your son.
My father was a teacher, so he did know names people were using, and for any given name could probably think of a child he wouldn't want me to share a name with!
btw and fwiw, Max is a good name.
That birth month, Life magazine featured a full page spread of a home birth (ewwww); their newborn had the same name.
This event is on a list of stuff I/we came to on our own, at the same time as everyone else.
I'm finding that phenomenon to be rather common. Seems like a bunch of other people are reaching the same conclusion...
One of my favorite examples (although there are many) is inline skating/rollerblading. It was all the rage in the early 90s or so. It's rare to see someone rollerblading today. I pick that example because it was somewhat related to tech that it took off. But there's no good reason for it to have pretty much died off.
I suspect there's a few issues
- If your parents don't skate you'll probably never get competent at it
- You need to be actually good to not injure yourself or on a pretty flat area. Rollerblades do not handle holes in pavement nearly as well as bicycles or shoes.
- Bicycles have actual utility like getting to work/places. For Covid a ton of people bought skates [1] but honestly I never saw that many more people skating then compared to before/after.
- They're pretty bulky. A Bicycle can transport and lock itself up but if you skate somewhere you'll need a bag to store them.
[1]: https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/29078390/rollerblade-ren...
And, yeah, it isn't an activity that has any real utility. I don't really bike (didn't learn as a kid because didn't have a real place to safely bike--narrow country roads). But might have done so if there was a real practical reason to do so.
Of course, inline skating was a popular activity at one time and it just fell out of fashion.
That's less popular than the single name Matthew for boys, or any one of Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, or Jennifer, in that same year. I expected it would be higher: my own sister is one of these, and I had a friend circle in my 20s that included a Katie, a Katherine (who went by Kat), a Caitlin, and a Kathryn.
Source: baby name popularity is one of our favorite test data sets at Row Zero, and we do lots of analyses like this for fun, e.g. https://rowzero.io/blog/baby-names-rise-of-n
Between, say, 2012 and 2018 there was a wave of “Ronin”.
I still get a chuckle thinking of these soccer dads, watching from the sidelines, wistfully thinking:
My son … The wayward samurai…
My wife and I legitimately sat down and came up with a list of 50 names we each liked, and from the 98 we had totaled up, we applied a series of different filters to get to an answer over the span of several weeks.
First we each went through the list, and force removed half of them, each of us taking turns eliminating one at a time.
From the remaining 50 we rated them, and removed anything that scored under a 6 from either of us, or under 15 points total.
Then we had 20 left, that we talked through each fairly extensively. We covered etymology, popularity, age association, popular cultural associations, you name it. After that we each removed 5 more.
Once we were down to the top ten, armed with frankly far too much knowledge about these names at this point, we reranked them individually and tallied up the scores.
Two names stood head and shoulders above the rest, one scoring around a 19 total and the other scoring around a 17. Those became our daughter's first and middle names.
The first was named by his mother's choice: First name after her father (a perfectly reasonable "Edward"), the middle name after my dad ("Leonard," which we never call him.)
The second was even more of a surprise than the first, but that meant it was my turn: "Jonathan," after a favorite character from a novel. The middle name was chosen by his big brother, to give a little sense of ownership or participation: "Adam."
It's... interesting. More Khaleesis and Gokus than you'd think.
I think he was onto something. Never heard of either of those names in the real world.
[edit] OK, so I had to check and I was wrong. Must have been one of his other essays. But for the uninitiated, here you go: https://harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm
You're welcome ;-)
Cheekiness aside, naming our children has been a fun, stressful, but ultimately rewarding endeavor and this paper was very on point.
However, if I have a daughter, I will name her Britney - an anagram for Presbyterians
season 7 ep 13
> 2 Related works: Surprisingly, no one has ever done any research on naming strategies (so long as you conveniently ignore [4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25] and likely other work).
“A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors”
by Allen C. Goodman (Wayne State University), Joshua Goodman (Harvard), Lucas Goodman (UMD), and Sarena Goodman (the Federal Reserve Board)
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...