Names -- Traditional or Trendy

April 4, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I suspect the recent upsurge in Old Testament names for boys expresses not so much a religious sentiment as it does a desire to be different but not too different. This trend towards trendiness and away from tradition isn’t just an American thing. It’s also true in France, where parents have had a free choice of names for less than 20 years. Before that, there was a government-approved list parents had to choose from.

The government still offers new arrivals some advice on names. Bapiste Coulmont links to a list of “French” names the government recommends to immigrants who want to become French – a process called “francisation.”* The list has about 400 names that are “French or currently used in France.”

But the French themselves don’t seem to have much use for that list. When I checked the most popular names that actual French parents were giving their newborns (the most recent year I could get was 2006), for both boys and girls, three of the top ten names were not on the list of “French” names.

Enzo (1)	Ines (7)
Nathan (4)	Jade (9)
Tom (8)	Lola (10)

From what I understand, other unlisted names – Margaux, Apolline, and Victoria – have since climbed into France’s top ten.

Japan too. Several decades ago, when I was in Japan, nearly all girls’ names ended in either ko (子), a few in mi (美) or e (江). Now none of the popular girls’ names have these endings.

The trend isn’t universal. In Italy, all the top names are traditionally Italian.** Joseph and Mary (Giuseppe and Maria) top the list.

* The counterpart of Americanization. When the movie “The Americanization of Emily” was released in 1964, that name wasn’t even in the top 250, but the title was prescient. Thirty-two years later, Emily had climbed to #1, and she held that spot for over a decade.

** Italy has no list of approved names. But the law does allow a civil official to “advise and dissuade overly-creative parents” who propose names that are “ridiculous, shameful, or embarrassing.” (A newspaper article on this is here.) In the US, you can name your daughter Brooklyn no questions asked. But in Italy, tying to name your kid Testaccio might not go so smoothly.

Defectors

April 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

After putting up the previous post, I wondered if maybe there actually had been some Moussa Koussa jokes. So I check Andy Borowitz’s tweets. Borowitz is a funny guy (one of today’s tweets:

“What does Fox News do on April Fool's Day?” is a question akin to “What do slutty nurses do on Halloween?”

In fact, he did have some Koussa tweets, but they were mostly jokes about the name, not the man. For example,

Gaddafi Replaces Moussa Koussa with New Foreign Minister, Banana Fanna

Now, here’s the sociological connection. Andy Borowitz was a sociology researcher. Well, not quite. But he appears in the initial footnote of a classic article, Wendy Griswold’s “American Character and the American Novel” (AJS 1981).

The indefatigable research team consisted of Andy Borowitz . . . .

Clearly, Borowitz coulda been a contender. Instead, he turned his back on sociological research (maybe he wasn’t all that indefatigable after all) and went with comedy. I guess it was a choice between sending out reprints or cashing in residuals. In Hollywood, he created “Fresh Prince,” which ran for six seasons and is probably still being recycled today somewhere on cable.

'Taint Funny, Moussa

April 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Moussa Koussa, the newly defective foreign minister of Libya, was a sociology major at Michigan State.

My first reaction was that this was a set-up line waiting for a punch line. But it’s not funny, and it’s not an April Fool thing. This guy was involved in some very nasty stuff – assassinations of Libyan exiles, probably Lockerbie and perhaps another airplane bombing. (Video of old TV news stories is here.)

Men and Women of the Blogosphere

March 31, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Talk is cheap. So is blogging, which is pretty much the same thing economically – no fixed costs (unless you have to pay for your own computer and Internet), no variable costs. There are many economist bloggers (some with huge followings), including quite a few heavy hitters – Presidential advisors (like Greg Mankiw), Nobel Prize winners (like Paul Krugman). But they are mostly men.

There are 52 women on the list of the top 1,000 economists. None of them blog.

That was the subhead in a recent Christian Science Monitor article (“Where Are the Female Economist Bloggers?”) by Matthew Kahn.

Economist Diane Lim Rogers responded:

I think we female economists have our own empirical (not just theoretical) reasons why those of us who blog aren’t the same people as those of us who are at the top of the REPEC* list. . . . It’s called we have and care about other things and people in our lives, not just our own individual, introspective views about how the supposed world around us supposedly works (in our own opinion)! And that’s even things and people other than what Matthew counts so endearingly as the “home production” sort of things–you know, “cooking and rearing children.”

Kahn, besides speculating on why female economists don’t blog, also says why they should blog:

The shrewd academic uses his blog to market his ideas and to “amplif” his new academic results. This is a type of branding.

But I think that when it comes to the reasons men blog – the things they care about – Lim Rogers and XKCD are closer to the mark.** It’s about Ego, though it usually marches under the banner of Principle.



Is it gender stereotyping to assume that the figure at the computer is a male and that the out-of-panel voice is a female? Stereotype or not, it is apparently accurate – and not just for economists.

The female sociologist bloggers I know of who have children at home have either joined blogging co-ops or reduced their output to a very occasional post. “Home production” and time-opportunity costs may play a part. But if the rewards of blogging are, as Lim Rogers says, narcissistic (telling everyone how the world works, not to mention the pissing contests that go on between blogs or in the comments sections), fewer women may be interested in these gratifications. I suspect that the region of the blogosphere where the interaction is supportive rather than combative, that’s where you’ll find more women


*RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)) ranks economists by publications, citations, and other criteria. As Kahn says, it “provides an objective measure of who is ‘Royalty’ in the economics profession.”

**Matt Yglesias also included this when he reprinted Lim Rogers’s remarks.