Econ Readers

  Conventional wisdom suggests that naming is correlated with success, but the authors point out that this correlation extends much farther back than naming. In most cases, the names parents give their children reflect their social backgrounds and social classes.   The author recounts an incident involving a New York City man named Robert Lane who named his son "Winner" and his next son "Loser." Loser Lane succeeded in life, rising to the rank of a police officer in New York City, where he was nicknamed Lou by his colleagues. In contrast, Winner Lane has been arrested nearly 30 times. The author recalls another incident where a mother named her daughter Temptress, intending to call her Tempestt, and the girl later brought many men into the house while her mother was at work. Levitt then poses the question: does a child's name influence his life, or does his name reflect the lives of his parents? Giving a child a name is the first step in parents' belief that...

  Statistically, most parents are unaware of the dangers their children face.   There has been a boom in the industry of parenting experts in recent decades, many of which disagree with one another. Since emotions carry more weight than rational arguments, parenting experts have the best chance of gaining attention by engaging the emotions surrounding parenting. Parents often seek out experts out of fear, but they can be poor risk assessors since they fear the "wrong things." It would be misguided for a parent to keep their child away from a friend's house because her parents keep a gun, but allow the child to spend a lot of time at another friend's house with a swimming pool instead since a child is 100 times more likely to die from a swimming accident than from a gun accident. In terms of risks, there is a difference between those that scare people and those that kill them. Risks people believe they can control are less frightening than those they believe they canno...