From today's UK headlines:
"Names affect top-earning potential"
"The key to a six-figure salary? It's all in the name"
"Want to earn £100K? Best make sure you're called David or Susan"
The details, courtesy of the Independent:
"What's in a name? The key to a lucrative lifestyle, it seems. Men called David and women called Susan are more likely to earn in excess of £100,000 a year, according to analysts working for Barclays Bank. Being christened John, Michael, Elizabeth or Sarah also gives you a higher chance of being a six- figure earner."
To quote the editor stung by the baby Yahoo hoax: "If it were real, it would have been a good story indeed." But the facts, alas, are much more mundane.
Barclays did not, as the papers report, list names with a high rate of earning high wages. They did not look at the percentage of Susans and Davids pulling in the pounds. They simply sifted through their records of customers earning more than £100,000 a year, and listed the names that occurred most often. In other words, they came up with a list of the most common names for mid-career Englishmen (and women.)
Here's the full list:
GIRLS
Susan
Elizabeth
Sarah
Jane
Helen
Patricia
Jacqueline
Alison
Anne
Nicola
BOYS
David
John
Michael
Paul
Andrew
Richard
Robert
Mark
Stephen
I don't have good historical figures for England, but based on US and Scotland data those names (especially the boys) look like a snapshot of the 1940s-1960s. That's precisely what you'd expect if names had no effect on earning power -- the opposite of what the headlines claimed.
In the modern economy, a typical worker sees a sharp increase in real wages until about age 35. The pace of increase then slows, with a relative plateau of 20 years at peak earnings followed by a gradual decline. The historical figures for women will be skewed somewhat by the advent of the sexual revolution; a girl born in 1950 faced a very different professional landscape than one born in 1970. So sticking to the boys, here's the US popularity curve for the Barclays names:
As you would predict from the economic lifecycle curve, the names on the Barclays list were big hits about 35-55 years ago. Based on this, I wouldn't rush out and change my name to Davy-Sue.
But before we brush this off and move on, one name did strike me...by its absence. James was the #1 name in America over the period 1940-1970, and reached close to that level of popularity in the Scotland sample as well. In the U.S. it's an across-the-board classic, unusually free of class, race, or sectarian associations. So a call out to UK readers: why didn't James make the list?
Comments
I don't know; I'd always assumed James was a pretty common name in Britain.I'm a 1970 James, and there's always been at least one other James in most peer groups -- classrooms, sports teams, work colleagues etc.Maybe a lot of Barclay's Jameses go by the Jim nickname?
Maybe the statician who put this list together had lived all his life enduring the stench of the River Thames. Perhaps he felt a certain bias against "James" because it conjured up the odors of mold, sewage, and the occasional dead body wrapped in Saran (ala Derek Jamran's "Jubilee").
Hi LauraI love your blog. I found the following on National Statistics Online.www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/xsdataset.asp?vlnk=302I wonder if there are just more of the other names than there are of James? It looks as if possible (from the slim data) as if James was more popular over here after the age range for it to show up in the survey...Pathetically tiny sample size, but our 5 British mature students called James were all born after 1970.Also, I think the contact for more info for England & Wales is Nadine Hamer nadine.hamer@ons.gov.uk - don't know if that helps.
As a James myself, i do think James should have made the list. It is a very common names, three of my nephews are James'!
We should set up a campaign for the name James, it is a rather attractive name!!!
i don't no
I'm James, born in 1949, yes it's very common there have alwasy been seeral with me, whereever I go. My 4-year old [yes, not a typo, he's adopted]son is David. (My father-in-law's middle name). Can't wait for those big bucks to start rolling in by the time I retire. He'll be taking care of the wife and I>
Is there a way for us to get the Name Voyager to display several names at once like that?
Similarly, a British insurance company came out with a list of the names of people who file the most claims -- Joy was the number one name.
Thanks again, Laura. What I love most about your blog is your rigor. Even a basic understanding of what statistics can tell us - and what they can't - is so rare in the blogosphere and the world at large that I find each and every post of yours a refreshing and analytical change! I am most definitely a big fan.
Hi Laura,I am hoping you can/will write an entry or a comment about the name Connor/Conner and what sparked its huge popularity.I am also extremely curious about the growth of the name Dorian for boys. I knew two who were born in 1978 but have never come across any others. I think there was or is a female character on a soap opera named Dorian, but I've never noticed any males with that name in pop culture. What am I missing?
You mention that James was a very popular name in Scotland, but perhaps not the rest of the UK? This might explain why it did not make the list, as in Britain a much higher proportion of high earners are congregated in the richer South East of England. Put more simply - Scots and Nothern English are less likely to earn these high wages than Southern English, which would make popular Scottish names less likely to be on there.Although...Andrew is on there and that is a perennially popular name for Scottish boys (my husband, 29, had 4 other Andrews in his Priumary school class)
I am waiting for the bucks to start rolling in. I am a 1950s Susan. As to there being a shortage of Jameses, you haven't met my family -- every other male in the family is either Jim (James) or Bob (Robert). Susan
David and Susan... hmm those are the names of the main characters played by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in the screwball classic "Bringing Up Baby." If you listen they say each others name ad nauseam throughout the film. In the commentary, Bogdanovich notes that the way Grant pronounced "Susan" struck a note with audiences and led to an increase of Susans beginning in the 40s.
To the poster who mentioned Dorian: read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde. Dorian in that book is a man (and quite a nasty one at that).
I'm English, and my brother (who is 15) is called James, and I have to tell you that it is VERY popular in south-west England. There have always been at least two other Jameses in his class and as a result, hardly anybody called James gets called James. He gets called Cooper (our surname), Jims, Fred (his middle name is Frederick) and all kinds of other random names to seperate him from the crowd of other boys called James. I have also known boys called James known as Travis, Peewee and Jammo, and hardly any actually CALLED James.
Scots don't need to earn any money, since thetheir government is heavily subsidised by the British government. Also, they can vote on matters affecting only England and Wales, but English MPs can't vote on Scottish matters. I know this has nothing to do with names, but this issue (known as the West Lothian Question) makes me angry and I like to rant about it.
ggg
Don’t name your kids Dave. All the Daves I know have strange/weird personality. Not that they are bad people. Just strange... And I'm not the only one that gets this feeling
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