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| Visions & Revisions |
Unconventional Wisdom
07/01/2005
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You try to determine statistically if those with distinctly black names, for
example, Roshanda or DeShawn, suffer an economic penalty in our society. Does
the name one is given affect life outcomes?
We find the name you are given does not impact your life. However, the
circumstances you are born into affect the name that you are given and the life
you lead. So, for instance, young, single African-American mothers are more
likely to choose unique names that no one else has than are, say, middle-class,
white, married parents. It is not the name Emily or LaToya that causes
differences in life outcomes. Rather, it is the age and socioeconomic status of
the parent, and several other factors.
The way we answer this question is to
look at every child born in California over a 40-year period. We look at their
circumstances at birth, and compare their life circumstances 20 or 30 years
later when they themselves give birth and their child’s birth certificate enters
the data set.
What factors drive the migration of a name’s popularity through different
socioeconomic strata? Britney was considered a very posh name a few years
back.
The pioneers in names tend to be very highly educated parents. These people
start trends with names. Over time, as names become popular, they tend to work
their way down the socioeconomic ladder. For instance, a name like Britney was
considered very classy in the ’70s. Now it is actually a name that is a very
strong signal of low socioeconomic status. What appears to happen is
less-educated parents see what the highly educated parents are naming their
kids. Once a name is adopted by less-educated parents, highly educated parents
abandon the name and move on to a new set of names.
You turn the conventional wisdom of parenting on its ear by suggesting that
good parents are defined not by what they do, but by who they are. What should
obsessive parents who force their children to watch Baby Mozart DVDs take from
this?
Our answer would be to relax. There is little evidence in the data that
particular activities that parents engage in with their child have a noticeable
impact on early test scores. For instance, in the data, we see that reading to
your children or taking your children to museums has no impact on how they will
ultimately perform in schools.
It is not that parents aren’t important. It just seems that the decisions you
make that are important to your child’s outcome really happen much earlier in
life. We do find important differences in children’s test scores based on the
educational level and socioeconomic status of their parents, as well as the age
of their parents. That leads us to think it is who you are, not what you do,
that is most important in raising children.
While conclusions like this may seem like common sense, they may also be
politically incorrect. Would you be interested in such topics if they were
not?
I don’t think there is anything per se attractive to me about forbidden
topics. I think, rather, the reason my work has taken me in that direction is
because those are the areas that no one else is thinking about carefully. As a
consequence, we often have the wrong ideas or perceptions about the answers. My
own rule, which I have had since I began as an economist, is to study questions
that I find interesting. I have never worried whether or not anyone else might
find them interesting.
Photograph by Kristofer Dan-Bergman.
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