Chapter 6 Summary

In Chapter 6, the authors explore the topic of names and, specifically, whether a person's given name affects his or her outcome in life and why people give their babies certain names to begin with. The authors discuss, more particularly, how blacks and whites name their babies very differently and whether having a distinctively black-sounding name affects one's life outcome. Finally, a significant portion of Chapter 6 is devoted to merely listing and comparing the most popular names in certain years given to babies of blacks and whites, high income and low income people and high education and low education people.

Chapter 6 begins with the observation that most parents believe that the name that they give their child will affect their child's life outcome. One black man seems to experiment with whether this notion has any validity by naming his two sons Winner and Loser...