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Statistics Journal 10/2/11

Freakonomics Names

Steven Levitt’s video on naming kids, was very interesting in how he looked at the date and how he came up with his conclusions. The main topic behind this video was to determine whether names of children matters in how successful they are and the way people view them. The overall message of the the statistics video was names in society can matter and be careful what you name your children. Names affect the outcome of peoples lives because through the observations of Levitt we saw that its harder to get a job with a black name and that 33% less blacks than whites were getting calls back for the same jobs. Also it took 10 weeks for a white person to get a job and 15 weeks for blacks on average.

The story of the two boys loser and winner helps explain this video because even if the names were the same, its how the boy is brought up and how he is as a kid more than his name. The video suggests that when names your kid, don’t think of a creative name, give the child a successful name so that the outcome of their lives is good. Based on the evidence from the freakonomics video, I think we can conclude that names really do matter and a black persons name is going to be harder to find a job and people are going to view you differently.