Freakonomics: 5–Epilogue

Anyone who tries even casually to follow their advice may be stymied, for the conventional wisdom on parenting seems to shift by the hour.

Sandman offered a comparison between mad-cow disease (a super scary but exceedingly rare threat) and the spread of food-borne pathogens in the average home kitchen (exceedingly common but somehow not very scary).

And if you are told that you have 10 percent chance of dying within the next minute, you’ll probably panic. So it’s the imminent possibility of death that drives the fear—which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of death would be to think about it on a per-hour basis.

Imagine that you are a government official charged with procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart disease. Which cause do you think the members of Congress will open up the coffers for?

The unlikeliness of Harris’s bombshell—she was a grandmother, no less, without PhD or academic affiliation—prompted both wonder and chagrin.

Certain facets of a child’s outcome—personality, for instance, or creativity—are not easily measured by data.

But the most serendipitous aspect of the CPS program—for the sake of a study, at least—is how the school-choice game was played.

Indeed, academic studies have substantiated Mills’s anxiety.

Each switch represents a single category of the child’s data: his first-grade math score, his third-grade math score, his first-grade reading score, his third-grade reading score, his mother’s education level, his father’s income, the number of books in his home, the relative affluence of his neighborhood, and so on.

Perhaps educators and researchers are wrong to be so hung up on the black-white test score gap; the bad-school/good-school gap may be the more salient issue.

Keep in mind that these results reflect only a child’s early test scores, a useful but fairly narrow measurement; poor testing in early childhood isn’t necessarily a great harbinger of future earnings, creativity, or happiness.

Such parents may believe—as fervently as the governor of Illinois believed—that every children’s book is a talisman that leads to unfettered intelligence.

Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late.

As any modern parent knows, the baby-naming industry is booming, as evidenced by a proliferation of books, websites, and baby-name consultants.

Given the location and timing of this change—dense urban areas where Afro-American activism was gathering strength—the most likely cause of the explosion in distinctively black names was the Black Power movement, which sought to accentuate African culture and fight claims of black inferiority.

How does a name migrate through the population, and why? Is it purely a matter of Zeitgeist, or is there some sensible explanation?

We all know that names rise and fall and rise—witness the return of Sophie and Max from near extinction—but is there a discernible pattern to these movements?

But as a high-end name is adopted en masse, high-end parents begin to abandon it. Eventually, it is considered so common that even lower-end parents may not want it, whereby it falls out of the rotation entirely.

So the implication is clear: the parents of all those Alexandras, Laurens, Katherines, Madisons, and Rachels should not expect the cachet to last much longer.

They may want something traditional or something bohemian, something unique or something perfectly trendy.