The Fashion Report – Names Edition

June 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

In Sunday’s Times, David Leonhardt, who usually patrols the economics beat, looks at fashions in baby names (here). His primary focus is the rapid decline in old-fashioned names for girls. The “nostalgia wave” of Emma, Grace, Ella, and other late-nineteenth-century names, he argues, is over.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Well, yes and no. Sarah and Emma may be in decline, but the big gainer among girls’ names is Sophia, an equally nostalgic name that was last popular at the turn of the twentieth century. Isabella, too, (third largest gain) follows the same trend line. Besides, the nostalgia for old names was selective. Emma and Grace may have come back, but many other old-fashioned names never became trendy. One hundred years ago and continuing through the 1920s, one of the most popular girls’ names in the US was Mildred. (You can trace the popularity baby names at the Census website.)

“The lack of recent Jane Austen movies has probably played a role,” says Leonhardt, though he’s probably joking. Not only is Emma still in the top five, but I suspect that films of that persuasion appealed more to the prejudices and sensibilities of post-childbearing women. But the media do have an impact. In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner showed how fashions in names often trickle down. The Sophias and Isabellas become stylish first among the upscale and educated; it may be several years, even decades, before they became more widely popular. But the media/celebrity channel can bypass that slow trickle. As Leonhardt says, how else to explain the boom in Khloe?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Similarly, Addison, the second biggest gainer, may have gotten a boost from the fictional doctor who rose from “Gray’s Anatomy” to her own “Private Practice.” In the first year of “Gray’s Anatomy, the name Addison zoomed from 106th place to 28th. The name is also just different enough from Madison, which had been in the top ten for nearly a decade. Its stylishness was fading fast among the fashion-conscious.

Madison herself owed her popularity to the media. She created a big “Splash” soon after the film came out. As Tom Hanks says in the scene below, “Madison’s not a name.” [The clip will start at the beginning of relevant part of the scene. For purposes of this post, it should stop at 3:23, after the punch line (“Good thing we weren’t at 149th street.”). But I couldn’t figure out the code to make it stop.](Update: Disney has forced YouTube to remove this clip. See the footnote* for a transcript.)




At the time, the Hanks character was correct. Before “Splash” (1984) Madison was never in the top 1000. The next year, she was at 600. Now she has been in the top ten for nearly fifteen years, and at number two or three for half those years. (There have not yet been any Madisons in my classes. I suspect that will change soon.)

Boys’ names seem governed by somewhat different rules, with less overall variation, though recent trends are towards names with a final “n” (four out of the five big gainers in the chart above) and Biblical names.

These recent changes in girls' names aren't about nostalgia. Name trends are like fashion trends, they come and go. And, like fashion, name trends can be media driven, especially now that media can short-circuit the slower class diffusion process.

* Transcript of the relevant segment of the Splash clip:

Hanks: I'm going to have to call you something in English, because I can't pronounce -
Hannah: What - what are English names ?
Hanks: There's millions of them, I guess. Jennifer, Joanne, Hillary. . . .: Names, names. Linda, Kim .Where are we? [Cut to close up of Madison Ave. street sign] Madison.
Elizabeth, Samantha --
Hannah: I like Madison.
Hanks: Madison's not a name. [ a beat] Well, all right. Madison it is. Good thing we weren't at 149th street.

Cupidity

June 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A year ago, I wrote post a called “Lies My Online Dating Partner Told Me.” It was based entirely on a blog post at OK Cupid, the free online dating service – “The Big Lies People Tell in Online Dating” (here). I wondered how people feel when they find out that the person they are dealing with on screen may be hiding important truths.

Now I think I know. And my online dissembler is OK Cupid.

If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone’s first names into his sentences. (Nick Paumgarten in an article on dating sites in this week’s New Yorker.)

OK Cupid would also be surrounded by a gaggle of sociologists waiting for the blogger side of OK’s personality to emerge again. The no-pay site (they make their money from ads) was founded by four Harvard math majors. (“We do the math to get you the dates,” says their logo.) Christian Rudder was the one who did the blog, and every so often he would post wonderful graphics from the research he could do on the millions of messages that hopeful people sent through their Website. Often his charts and findings found their way into other blogs (including this one) as well as the mainstream media.

The New Yorker article has a long section on OK Cupid. It includes the factoid that around Valentine’s Day this year, Cupid was bought for $50 million by Match.com.

You won’t see that information on the website. Nowhere does it say, “OK Cupid is a wholly owned subsidiary of Match.com.” You also won’t find Rudder’s blog post less than a year before that deal, “Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating.”* It begins

Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize. . . I intend to show, just by doing some simple calculations, that pay dating is a bad idea; actually, I won't be showing this so much as the pay sites themselves, because most of the data I'll use is from Match and eHarmony's own public statements. [emphasis in the original post]

It’s an excellent critique and caveat. But OK Cupid voluntarily removed it as courtesy to their new masters. I feel as though the hip, carefree spirit I’d been chatting with turned out to be a life insurance salesman.

* OK could remove this post from their site, but they could not expunge it completely from the Internet. You can find an archived copy here. It’s still worth reading.

Oh, and if you're not sure of the definition of the word that is the title of this post, you ought to look it up, especially if you're going to be taking the SATs..

Cocktail Umbrellas and Invisible Pens

June 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

How many gas stations are there in Mexico City?

At an ASA long, long ago, I went to a session on jobs outside of academia. One speaker – I can’t remember his name – spoke about getting a job as a consultant. The job interview, he said, was not going to be like what we expected. “You’re not going to be asked much about your vita or your research. Instead, they might throw a question at you like: How many gas stations are there in Mexico City?” And unlike students that aren’t paying attention in class, you probably shouldn’t say, “Could you repeat the question?”

No, they didn’t have a client who was going to be motoring around Mexico City and was worried about running on empty. Instead, they wanted to see both your general knowledge and your strategies for getting an answer. Maybe you have some idea of the population of Mexico City. Then you have to estimate how many of those people have cars. But what is a reasonable ratio of gas stations to cars? Or is there another strategy?

In any case, some companies are still at it.

• Argus Information: How many traffic lights in Manhattan?
• Gryphon Scientific: How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given time in the United States?
• Towers Watson: Estimate how many planes are there in the sky.
• Google: How many basketballs can you fit in this room?

These were reported by Glassdoor.com based on information passed along by job seekers. These questions, and others, have been reported at HuffPo , Shine (Yahoo) , and elsewhere.

Some of the questions are looking not for imaginative calculation but imaginative problem-solving

• Goldman Sachs: If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?
• Procter & Gamble: Sell me an invisible pen.
• Diageo North America: If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?
• VWR International: How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons etc.?

Some are just math or logic puzzles with only one correct answer.

• Jane Street Capital: What is the smallest number divisible by 225 that consists of all 1’s and 0’s?
• Goldman Sachs: Suppose you had eight identical balls. One of them is slightly heavier and you are given a balance scale. What’s the fewest number of times you have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
• Google: You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?

And some are personal, even (from an academic perspective) to the point of being nosy.

• Pottery Barn: If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?
• Merrill Lynch: Tell me about your life from kindergarten onwards.
• Kiewit Corp.: What did you play with as a child?

(The Pottery Barn question stands out as different from all the others. It seems much nicer. If I were choosing a place to work based on these questions, I'd have to go with Pottery Barn, unless it’s a trick question. Besides, I have a good idea of what the company actually sells.)

Which eminent (or even not-so-eminent) sociologists would have done well in an interview like this? Which would have had a hard time?

Sports as Life

June 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post, I questioned whether sports teams are a useful analogy for broader spheres of life, at least when it comes to affirmative action.

After I posted it, I tried a different thought experiment: suppose that sports really were life. Imagine a world in which the most important factor determining where you stand is your achievement in sports. If you’re a good athlete, on the starting team, the world is yours. If you’re on the bench but getting some playing time, you’re still OK. But if you’re not good enough to make the team, your chances in life are pretty bleak.

Let’s call this world High School.

Suppose you’re a white parent, and your kids are in a high school where whites are in the minority, maybe a quarter of the population. Suppose that your kids are not athletic enough to get on any of the teams. The high school is especially sports minded Sports determine how kids are treated, whether they are accepted and respected or looked down or ignored – and not just by the other kids but by the teachers, the administrators, everybody. Kids’ chances for success in other areas, their ability to have the good things in life, maybe even their physical and emotional health – all these depend on making the team.

Your kids try, but they can’t quite get there. Maybe it’s because they didn’t play all that much when they were in grade school and just never developed the skills. For whatever reason, your kids and most of the other white kids fall on the low end of the sports distribution. Always low in the status hierarchy, your kids are miserable – unhappy, discouraged, possibly resentful.

If this were really high school, you could tell them, “It’s only a few years.” But remember, our imaginary high school is not just school; it’s a world. It’s the world. It’s not just four years; it goes on and on. It’s life.

Would you go to the coach and ask him to cut your kids a break? I mean, they might not be quite as good as the others, but given the chance, they can do a credible job. Would you try to organize the other white parents to get the school to change its policies on how the varsity is selected? Remember, your kids and most white kids are excluded from the good things in the school; to the extent that the non-whites notice them at all, the white kids are looked down on. Nobody wants anything to do with them.

Might you suggest that the attitudes and ideas of the majority non-whites might be improved by having more white kids on the teams with them? Might you also argue that playing with the better players might even improve the white kids’ game? Would you want the school to put some more white kids on the team even if it meant that a slightly more skilled non-white was kept off?

Or would you say that the only thing that counts is the ability to bring the ball up the floor, drive the lane, and stuff the ball through the hoop? If the other kids can do it better than your kids, even if it’s only slightly better, then it’s only right that your kids continue to live their second-class existence.