Freakonomics Page #2

because baby names are changing today faster than ever before.

Names are important, because they have a lot to do with your family, your heritage.

Names represent huge, you know what I mean, street creditbility all of that.

Names are definitely a big part of meeting someone

A name can make you popular, and a legend.

Without a name, u're nobody you've got to have a name. It tells your whole identity.

But just how important can name really be?

I mean, unless you're Rockefella or Gates

Can your name have some sort of magical power over your entire destiny?

Not convinced? What about the following stories?

Once upon a time, there was a young mother who thought

she was naming her daughter after her favorite actress on the Cosby show

The smart and firery Tempestt Bledsoe

This is the most humiliating moment of my entire life

and there had been many

But having never seen the way it was spelled

The young mother mistakenly named her new born daughter

Temptress

Well, little Ms. Temptress didn't have an easy life growing up

-I don't even know -What do you mean?

As a teenager, she became sexually promiscuous

Got into a whole bunch of trouble

Back here you little sh*t

That's right. I better not let me catch you

And ended up in court

All Rise!

Leaving the judge to ask her mother

Is young temptress just living up to the expectation of her name?

Was that just one little misplaced 'T' and 'R'

all that stood the life of ease and huxtable success,

verses those long hard days in court ... and 'juvie'

Harvard professor Dr. Roland Fryer was determined to find out just that

What happened to Temptress has NOTHING

to do with her name, has everything to do with where she grew up

It turns out, Temptress grew up in a poor black neighborhood

The kind of neighborhood Dr. Fryer has been studying for years

As a world leading renowned economist and an leading expert on race in America

Fryer has been long been interested in what he calls

Cultural Segregation

The gap between White Culture and Black Culture

One embodiment of that culture is

what you name your kid

is probably one of the few cultural items that we can really measure

precisely

What we did was we looked at the effects of your kid's first name

on their life outcomes

Dr. Fryer analyzed the naming records of every baby born in the states of California

over the last forty years

and those names tell an unmistakable story

African American parents are more likely than any other ethnic group

to give their children unique names

There is definitely a distinction between names ...

... for white people and names for black people

Black names will be Molique, JAQuan, NayShan, Naheem

Rate this script:5.0 / 1 vote