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What’s in a Name?
“So does the name you give your child affect his life?”
I felt less of a geek this week (wow that rhymes) when I saw Tyra Banks talking about a great and interesting book that she had recently read and decided to base a show on a particular chapter. The book was Freakonomics and the topic at hand was Race and Names: The Turning Point. Here’s a quote from the book:“So does the name you give your child affect his life? Or is it your life reflected in his name? In either case, what kind of signal does a child’s name send to the world and most importantly, does it really matter?”
What does a person’s name really mean? Watch adults of all races give their opinions on the stereotypes of different ethnic names. Tyra and her audience are shocked to hear what assumptions they make and how people judge others all simply based on their names without even have seen them in person yet.
The best thing about this books is that it demonstrates how statistics can be creatively applied to important social problems. This book examines certain social trends, from the reasons behind a crime drop in the 1990s, to why drug dealers often are so poor they have to live with their parents, to the probability of someone with a “black” name getting a highly paid job. In each case, these topics will sometimes have leave you nodding along in agreement saying “Oh yeah! I never thought of that”, and at others asking yourself “That can’t be right…can it?”.
