When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (5 page)

But what if, instead of paying politicians a flat rate for their work, thereby encouraging them to exploit their office for personal gains that may go against the collective good, we incentivized them to work hard for the collective good?

How would I go about doing this? By offering politicians the equivalent of stock options in the legislation they produce. If an elected or appointed official works for years on a project that yields good outcomes in public health or education or transportation, let’s write them a big check five or ten years down the road, once those outcomes have been verified. What would you rather do: pay a U.S. secretary of education the standard $200,000 salary whether or not he does anything worthwhile—or write him a check for $5 million in ten years if his efforts actually manage to raise U.S. test scores by 10 percent?

I have run this idea by a number of elected politicians. They do not think it is entirely crazy, or at least they are polite enough to pretend they don’t. I recently had the chance to talk through the idea with Senator John McCain. He listened carefully—nodding, smiling, the whole bit. I couldn’t
believe how engaged he was. This only encouraged me to go on and on, in great detail. Finally, he reached to shake my hand. “That’s a neat idea, Steve,” he said, “and good luck to hell with that!”

He turned and walked away, still smiling. I have never felt so good about being so fully rejected. I guess
that’s
what it takes to be a great politician.

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One great thing about starting a blog after you’ve written a book is that you can continue the conversation that the book began. A book, once it’s published, is pretty much set in stone. But the blog can be updated every day, every hour. Even better: you now have an army of book readers scouring the universe for stories that confirm (or refute) what you wrote in the book. Such was the case with a
Freakonomics
chapter called “Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?” in which we explored the impact that a person’s name has on his or her life outcomes. No reader was more diligent in the pursuit of this idea than the woman who inspired the first post in this chapter.

I got an interesting a package in the mail recently. It came from a Texas woman named M. R. Stewart, who says she is a proud mother and a grandmother to four pit bulls.

Ms. Stewart has an unusual hobby: clipping newspaper articles of a particular ilk. She sent me photocopies of her most recent finds, all from her local newspaper, over the past few years. The articles had two things in common:

        
1. They were all reports of alleged crime.

        
2. In each case, the alleged perpetrator’s middle name was Wayne.

I have to say I was stunned by the number of examples; in order to protect the potentially innocent, I will obscure their last names:

        
E
RIC
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
sex charges

        
N
ATHAN
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
kidnapping and beating, homicide

        
R
ONALD
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
triple homicide

        
D
AVID
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
ten years for practicing nursing without a license

        
L
ARRY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
homicide

        
P
AUL
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
theft

        
M
ICHAEL
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
theft

        
J
EREMY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
homicide

        
G
ARRY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
knowingly having unprotected sex when HIV positive

        
B
RUCE
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
homicide

        
J
OSHUA
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
assault of officer

        
B
ILLY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
homicide

        
B
ILLY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
assault

        
B
ILLY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
attempted murder and robbery

        
K
ENNETH
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
sex assault

        
J
ERRY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
attempted homicide

        
T
ONY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
aggravated assault of grandmother in front of her grandchildren, robbery

        
L
ARRY
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
home invasion

        
R
ICHARD
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
police standoff

        
C
HARLES
W
AYNE XXXXXX:
homicide

Maybe you could assemble a list this impressive for some other middle name, but I doubt it. And of course anyone with the middle name
of Wayne has a scary role model in the notorious Chicago serial killer
John Wayne Gacy Jr
.

Ms. Stewart also collects clippings with middle names that rhyme with Wayne: there were four DeWaynes, four Duanes, and two Dwaynes.

After going through the package, I pulled my two oldest daughters aside (they are six) and told them they were not allowed to ever have a boyfriend with the middle name Wayne. Olivia, who is obsessed with a boy named Thomas in her class, is going to check on his middle name tomorrow.

Thanks to our
Freakonomics
section about unusual first names—like Temptress, Shithead (pronounced shuh-TEED), and Lemonjello and Orangejello—we regularly get e-mails from readers with similar examples.

I don’t think there’s been a better submission than this one, courtesy of David Tinker of Pittsburgh. He sent
an
Orlando Sentinel
article
about a sixteen-year-old student athlete in Bushnell, Florida, named Yourhighness Morgan. He has a younger brother named Handsome, and cousins named Prince and Gorgeous. (FWIW, I grew up as a farm kid and we had a pig named Handsome.)

Yourhighness often goes by YH for short, and also sometimes Hiney—which, to the friends and family who call him this, apparently doesn’t mean “tush” or “derriere,” which it did in my house.

I like Yourhighness so much that I am going to try to get my kids to call me that for a while.

In other strange-name news, there’s
a sad
San Diego Tribune
article
(sent to us by one James Werner of Charlottesville, Virginia) about a gang murder. The victim’s name was Dom Perignon Champagne; his mother’s name is Perfect Engelberger.

What child hasn’t played around with the spelling of his or her name—wondering, for instance, how it would sound if it were spelled backward? (I admit that I signed some school papers “Evets Renbud” when I was a kid.) Well, now it seems that at least 4,457 parents last year did the work for their children, giving them the name “Nevaeh,” which is “Heaven” spelled backward. Jennifer 8. Lee (who is herself nomenclaturally blessed) has the story in
The New York Times,
showing an absolutely remarkable spike in popularity in a new name—from 8 instances in 1999 to 4,457 in 2005.

“Of the last couple of generations, Nevaeh is certainly the most remarkable phenomenon in baby names,” said Cleveland Kent Evans, president of the American Name Society and a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska. . . . The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. “Heaven spelled backwards,” he said.

The only squirrelly point in Lee’s article is the assertion that “Nevaeh,”
the seventieth ranked name for U.S. baby girls
, is now more popular than “Sara”—which is true, but a little misleading: the more common spelling of “Sarah” is still ranked No. 15.

Is it possible to predict which names will become more popular over time, and which will fall? We did make a run at predicting some of the boy and girl names that might become popular in ten years’ time, based on the observation that the masses tend to choose names that first become popular among high-education, high-income parents. But trends, including naming trends, tend to march to a drummer that isn’t always audible.

But if you had to pick one name in the past couple of years that you were sure would be abandoned, you might pick Katrina. Who on earth would name their baby after a hurricane that nearly wiped out an entire city?

And indeed, the name did slump in the twelve months following Hurricane Katrina, with only 850 incidences in the U.S. It slipped on the list of girls’ names from number 247 to number 382. That’s a pretty big drop—but why wasn’t the drop even steeper?

You might think it’s because parents far from the affected areas weren’t all that tuned in to the hurricane and its destruction. If so, you would be wrong.

In the two states most severely affected by Hurricane Katrina, the name actually received
more
action in the twelve months following the storm than in the twelve months previous. In Louisiana, the name increased from eight incidences
to fifteen, while in Mississippi, it spiked from seven to twenty-four. (I am guessing that the
rate
of Katrina namings increased even more, since lots of displaced people from both states were having babies—maybe named Katrina—elsewhere.)

Maybe new parents in Louisiana named their babies Katrina as affirmation that they’d lived through the storm, a kind of hair-of-the-dog naming treatment. Maybe they named their girls Katrina to commemorate friends or relatives who died or lost their homes. But one thing’s for sure: I don’t know of anyone who would have predicted that there would be more Katrinas in Louisiana and Mississippi after the hurricane. Which says at least as much about our incessant desire to predict the future as it does about the people who had babies last year.

An aptonym is a name that also describes what you do. In the old days, aptonyms weren’t coincidences; they were professional labels. That’s why there are still so many people named Tanner, Taylor, etc. But in our culture, they are quite rare.

Which is why I got so excited yesterday when I spotted a fantastic aptonym. Flipping through the latest issue of
Good
magazine, I stopped to look at the masthead. There are
two people listed under “Research,” which usually means fact-checking in magazine talk. One of the names is . . . Paige Worthy. That is: if a fact doesn’t get past Paige Worthy, then it’s not page-worthy, at least not for
Good
.

Is this a gag name? I doubt it—all the other names on the masthead look legit—and I sincerely hope not. Can you offer a better aptonym than Paige Worthy?

At the end of this post, we announced a contest inviting readers to submit the best aptonyms they’d ever come across. The submissions would be judged by a blue-ribbon panel of naming experts (a.k.a. Dubner and Levitt), and the winners would be sent a piece of Freakonomics swag.

We recently blogged about a fact-checker named Paige Worthy and asked you to send us your own aptonyms. You responded mightily, with
nearly three hundred submissions
. Judging from this sample, the dentists, proctologists, and eye doctors of America seem particularly prone to aptonymous behavior. Below you will find the best submissions. But first, a little more information about the person who got this all started, Paige Worthy:

Yes, she is real, and that is her real name. Not only is she a researcher for
Good
magazine, but she is also a copy editor for
Ride
and
King
magazines, both of which are geared toward a black male readership. The first is a car magazine; the second is a lad magazine, referred to in some quarters as Blaxim. “I’m a white girl, by the way,” Paige wrote in to say. She lives in New York and is originally from Kansas City—where, she says, “I worked at a little community outfit called the Sun Tribune Newspapers, where I was a copy editor and page designer, so my name was doubly apt at that point.”

So, because she is real and because her name is the perfect aptonym, Paige Worthy definitely gets whatever Freakonomics prize she wants. The other winners:

A reader named Robbie wrote in to tell of an Idaho court case about expected privacy in a public restroom stall. This was in relation to
the Larry Craig brouhaha
. Here’s a
brief excerpt from the Idaho case
:

The defendant was arrested for obscene conduct after an officer observed him, through a four-inch hole in a stall partition, masturbating in a public restroom. This Court determined that Limberhand had a legitimate expectation of privacy in the restroom stall notwithstanding the existence of the hole.

That’s right: the man in the stall who was arrested for masturbating in public was named Limberhand.

(Honorable mention in the Below-the-Belt category goes to the reader who wrote this: “I once edited a medical journal article about penile lengthening, written by Dr. Bob Stubbs. Best of all, he learned his technique from a Chinese plastic surgeon, Dr. Long.”)

A reader named Paul A. wrote this: “In Peru, Indiana, there’s a funeral home director whose last name is ‘Eikenberry’ (pronounced ‘I can bury’). He’s actually part of a partnership, and the funeral home is called (drumroll, please) ‘Eikenberry Eddy.’”

(Honorable mention in the Six-Feet-Under category to the reader who writes: “In my hometown [Amarillo, TX], there is a funeral director called Boxwell Brothers. This one can’t be beat.”)