Abstract
The adoption and abandonment of first names through time is a fascinating phenomenon that may shed light on social dynamics and the forces that determine cultural taste in general. Here we show that baby name dynamics is governed almost solely by deterministic forces, even though the emerging abundance statistics resembles the one obtained from a pure drift model. Exogenous events are shown to affect the name dynamics very rarely, and most of the year-to-year fluctuations around the deterministic trend may be attributed solely to demographic noise. We suggest that the rise and fall of a name reflect an “infection” process with delay and memory. The symmetry between adoption and abandonment speed emerges from our model without further assumptions.
Highlights
Baby names have been considered, for a long time, as a suitable model system for the study of cultural traits and social dynamics [1,2,3,4]
Unlike many other products and styles, in general no commercial interest is involved in the process, and the name dynamics provides us with a relatively ‘‘clean’’ example of the rise and fall of a fashion, reflecting the underlying social network and the basic processes that take place on it
In the Latin – Hellenistic world the differences between Greece and Roman cultural habits were emphasized by the historian Theodor Mommsen: ‘‘
Summary
Baby names have been considered, for a long time, as a suitable model system for the study of cultural traits and social dynamics [1,2,3,4]. Two names with the same level of attractiveness will not score the very same number of babies at a given year, because of the stochastic nature of the decision making process by each pair of parents.
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