Reply to Why are people in the DC area so weird about name popularity?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The question is why do people in DC care? I'm going to guess that many new parents you encounter in the DC area are older Millenials. Back when they were in college, and shortly thereafter, they were known as hispters and were the early listeners of podcasts, read NY Times booksellers in coffee shops, etc. That's this demographic.

At that time, Freakonomics and then the Freakonomics podcast became popular. Freakonomics popularized the idea that popular names trail rich people names. A name starts out obscure and is picked up by rich people. Much later, the name makes it down to the masses--the people your neighbor seemingly does not want to be mistaken with--and becomes one of the popular names. Hence, choosing a top name is equated with being average.[/quote]

This is actually a really good explanation. The link upthread to that 20 year old Freaknomics article on this "phenomenon" made something click for me. I don't think this is actually true -- there are way too many exceptions, and it's the sort of thing that sounds true until you start actually looking at the data are realize it's off. But Freaknonomics was very influential when it came out and I can see how people who were maybe early to mid 20s at the time would be heavily influenced it and internalize this idea that popular names somehow limited your kid's potential, and lead to a trend of people obsessing over giving their kids unpopular names.

Kind of hilarious, actually.[/quote]

Don’t worry, I’m sure that your Ezra will be fine even if saddled with a downwardly mobile name. [/quote]

Meanwhile someone's gonna name their newborn baby Sherman based on this thread and the misguided belief that it is an "upwardly mobile" name  :lol:  :lol: [/quote]

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