Photo: tomeppyThe answer to that question is almost certainly “no,” but a new study that is getting lots of media attention does claim that there is a correlation between having an uncommon name and being more likely to show up in the juvenile justice system. The study finds this relationship to be true both for blacks and whites.
As the authors clearly state in the abstract of their paper, “Uncommon names are likely not the cause of crime but correlated with factors that increase the tendency toward juvenile delinquency.”
To me, that makes the result a lot less interesting. It is kind of like saying that we know that people who regularly wear orange jumpsuits are more likely to be criminals, when orange jumpsuits just happen to be the required uniform in the state prison. The wearing of orange jumpsuits isn’t the cause of the criminal activity, but it is highly correlated with past criminal involvement.
And to be honest, I think there is a good chance that even the claimed correlation between unusual names and criminality is wrong. I only quickly glanced through the academic paper, but it seems to me like the authors have made a mistake that will bias their results.
The authors first compute criminality for each name by taking the ratio of the number of juvenile delinquents with that name and dividing it by the number of children total with that name. The higher that ratio, the more criminal the name. But then the authors take the log of that ratio. The problem is that the log of zero is equal to negative infinity, so any name for which that ratio is equal to zero gets dropped from the analysis.
The kinds of names that will have a ratio of zero are uncommon names for which no one with that name is a juvenile delinquent.
If I understand correctly what they are doing, if exactly one person has a particular name, the only way that the observation for that name will be included in their sample is if that person is a juvenile delinquent! This leads to a powerful bias toward mistakenly concluding that people with uncommon names are more likely to be criminals.
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With a name like Leland, would I be more likely to be a white-collar criminal?
There is the tale of Wayne as a middle name predisposing one to commit heinous acts:
The FREAKest Links:
“4real Wayne Smith” Edition
Not Wayne again…
But I have to agree that it is the parents who should bear the blame. A kid named “Prince Vlad Dracula”. is going to have problems in tthe schoolyard….
@Ben
The effect would still be felt for any 0 for 2′s out there, or 0 for 3′s, and so on. As the likelihood of an “0 for” goes down, you’d see a decreasing impact from this, but the more “unique” the name, the more likely this is to be a factor.
I think his point is not that people with truly unique names may be disproportionately left out if they are crime-free. It’s the fact that names with 0 criminals will be universally dropped from the analysis. So 1-of’s will be dropped unless they’re criminals, but so will folks who share their name with just one other person, and neither of them are criminals.
Nice catch Levitt, if that is indeed a mistake the author made.
@Ben
It isn’t just that the names have to be truly unique, but the problem Levitt describes will manifest whenever an uncommon name has no juvinile delinquents with that name the ratio is zero and the log is negative infinity. So you could have an uncommon name like Elana, and even if there are several or many of you with the same name, but no delinquents named Elana you end up with a negative infinity log.
Using the exact same methodology, I could prove people people with uncommon names are more likely to become professional athletes, e.g. BenJarvus Green-Ellis, Tayshun Prince.
Ben–
The name doesn’t have to be “truly” unique, only rare enough (say, no more than a few hundred) that the group has no one incarcerated, which is a pretty rare occurrence (roughly a percent of the total population, I believe). On the surface, it seems like a pretty egregious oversight.
Let’s keep a closer eye on Nassim Taleb.