JFSA hosts "rogue economist"

PAT JOHNSON

If your name is Dov, Akiva, Elon or Yonah, you may be headed for easy street. According to self-described "rogue economist" Steven D. Levitt, these names are chosen by parents with above-average education levels, whose children are likely to launch into life with the economic and social advantages that help lead to success.

Levitt – co-author, with Stephen J. Dubner – of the bestselling book Freakonomics, was in Vancouver last week as the guest speaker at a major fund-raising event for the Jewish Family Service Agency.

One of Levitt's best-known and most controversial theories is that the 1973 court decision Roe-versus-Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States, was responsible for the greatest drop in crime rate in recorded history, two decades on.

"Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal," Levitt wrote in the book. "And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe-versus-Wade – poor, unmarried and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortion has been too expensive or too hard to get – were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe-versus-Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet."

Levitt's research is wide-ranging.

On April 15, 1997, he said, seven million American children disappeared. The reason? Tax day in 1997 was the first time that Americans were asked to include the social security number of their dependents. The seven million "children" who disappeared had names like Fido, Princess and Spike, said Levitt. Seven million house pets who had been claimed as dependents in 1996 dropped from the tax department's sights the following tax year. The IRS bureaucrat who insisted that social security numbers be added for dependents could be considered solely responsible for $3 billion a year in new tax revenue. He received a bonus of $25,000. The comparatively paltry bonus, relative to the amount of money generated, according to Levitt, may be one explanation for a lack of incentive to innovate in organizations like the IRS.

Levitt's inspiration comes from unexpected sources. Having tragically lost an infant son to meningitis, Levitt and his wife joined a parents' grief support group. Levitt was struck by the number of parents who had lost children to swimming pool drownings, a phenomenon that rarely makes the newspaper – unlike when a child dies from playing with a gun. When he researched the issue, Levitt discovered that, "If you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is."

Piqued by a study suggesting that given names have a strong impact on an individual's success or failure, Levitt analyzed the names given to infant children based on race and on their parents' level of education, which, in turn, tends to be an indicator of income levels. Suffice to say, if your name is Katherine, Emma, Julia, Benjamin, Alexander or William, your parents are more likely to have post-secondary education. If your name is Kayla, Amber, Brittany, Travis, Brandon or Justin, your parents may be more likely to have dropped out of high school. Angel, Heaven and Misty hold particular appeal for a mother with low education levels.

Levitt mentions that the 20 boys' names that best signify higher education parents are "particularly heavy on the Hebrew" – Dov, Akiva, Sander, Elon, Yonah and Ansel are all names selected by parents with the highest education levels.

Levitt tests theories of race-based assumptions – concluding that, "The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name – whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn – does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn't the fault of their names ... the kind of parents who named their son Jake don't tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that's why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. A DeShawn is more likely to have been handicapped by a low-income, low-education, single-parent background. His name is an indicator – not cause – of his outcome." So couldn't DeShawn change his name to Jake? "Here is a guess: anybody who bothers to change his name in the name of economic success is ... at least highly motivated, and motivation is probably a stronger indicator of success than, well, a name."

Levitt was speaking before a packed audience of 900 at the Hyatt Regency last Friday. The event was the second annual JFSA Innovators Lunch.

Zoe Gropper, who spoke at the event, noted that the lunch fund-raiser was one of many "grand schemes" imagined by her late granddaughter, Naomi Gropper Steiner, who passed away last year.

Joseph Kahn-Tietz, executive director of JFSA, explained that the Innovators Lunch was a testament to the new partnerships and innovative projects that are key to the organizational success in the contemporary environment where government funding is increasingly scarce. Seventy per cent of program funding now comes from donors, he said.

The event was emceed by Tony Parsons, the B.C. institution who anchors the Global BC newscast.

Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.

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