Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Uncommon names

These days one can learn an awful lot about a person simply by searching the web for their name. A person with a very common name can hide among thousands of others with the same name; someone with an uncommon name has nowhere to hide.

It's probably inevitable that everyone has done something at some point in their lives that they wish to hide from someone. Consequently, we hypothesize that those who are more successful at hiding undesirable history are more successful in life.

Two experiments: 1. Study a large group of people over many years to see how starting salary, income, lifetime earning, or some other measure of quality of life correlate with commonness of their name. 2. Do a more directed study of selected people who actually do have something to hide and again correlate name commonness versus success in life.

By giving your baby boy the gift of the name Michael Johnson, just how many thousands of dollars of lifetime income are you giving him?

Or one can choose a name whose web search results will be dominated by someone famous.

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