Chapter 6 Of Levitt's Freakonomics

In “Chapter 6” of Freakonomics, the author, Steven Levitt, discusses whether the names parents give their children determine the kind of person their children turns out to be. At first, the chapter begins with a case about the Winner and Loser brothers, whose lives contradict their names. Additionally, the author tells a story of a woman who named her daughter Temptress. Conversely, in this case, Temptress did suggest something about the ungovernable behavior of the fifteen-year-old daughter. The two cases introduce the central conundrum of the chapter, “does the name [one] gives [ones] child affect his life? (165)” Examples mainly from the African-American community were used. Does skin color have a factor in life success, at least in the
Fryer Jr, a young black economist who wondered if “distinctive black culture [is] a cause of the economic disparity between black and whites or [just] a reflection of it. (166)” By examining massive amount of naming data from California, Fryer found out that, since the 1970s, the differentiation in black and white people’s names came to exist, and he suggests it has resulted in the phenomenon of “acting white”. Furthermore, Levitt came up with the twenty “Whitest” and the twenty “Blackest” names from the California study and further compared them with a series of audit studies. The studies revealed to Levitt that resumes with typical white-sounding names are favored more by job interviewers than those with distinctive black-sounding names (170). The results of the study evidently reveal that black-sounding names seem to have inherent disadvantages over white-sounding names, with people with the “Blackest” name having worse living outcomes than someone with the "whitest" names. However, Levitt suggests that economic disparity exists because the “blackest” names usually come from low-income and low-education background families, which leads him to conclude that the name is an indicator rather than a cause of future success