Thread by @Dylligent

I discovered something new about humans: how parents name their children reveals info on how many kids they’re planning to have.

Thread on forthcoming paper in #Demography on kids’ names & sexual/fertility norms among #Irish #Catholics

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/soca…

The map shows where Catholic parents chose distinctly Catholic names (Catholic Index) or traditional names (Traditional Name Score) for kids + their total surviving children as of 1911 (Net fertility). Family size highly correlated with Catholic and traditional names.

Background:
In 1860, a woman in an industrializing nation like Britain could expect to give birth to 6 children.
By 1940, that number had dropped to 2.

Ireland famously resisted these declines because of its strong Catholic values—or so it’s claimed. Yet there’s actually little scientific evidence linking Irish Catholic values to fertility.

I provide new insights into human behavior by studying the fertility outcomes (>300k children) and child-naming choices of 130,000 young women in Ireland in the early 20th c.

While we know that Catholics had more kids than Protestants, religion wasn’t the sole divider. Other factors included income, literacy, and farming. We need to move beyond “Catholic vs Protestant” to understand how *culturally* religious people were. #intersectionality

Child naming provides a new window into religious attachment.

Choosing distinctly Catholic names (Brigid, Patrick) = culturally Catholic

Choosing traditional names (John, Mary) = conservative/traditional

First names are especially interesting because unlike surnames, they reflect parents’ tastes and influences.

(See @leah_boustan @jdavidhacker612 Goldstein/Stecklov for other cool work on names)

Main finding #1: The names that parents choose for their children strongly predict the number of kids they’ll have.

Main finding #2: Catholic name choices are associated with more children, but mainly for rural Catholics. Conservative names, which were common in farming areas, are a much stronger predictor of large families.

Main finding #3: Cities fostered experimentation with non-traditional names and reduced fertility.

I also compared Irish couples to Irish immigrants in USA in @ipums - Emigrants had fewer kids, and when they moved to American cities, they also changed how they named their children. (Anyone seen the movie Brooklyn?)

Takeaway; Cities were key to reducing family size. Ireland was slow to urbanize and modernize its economy, which helps explain why average family size stayed high. Slow urbanization probably a bigger factor than “Catholic values” in Ireland’s lasting high fertility rate.

Harvards Arensberg+Kimball visited rural #eire in the 30s: saw young people raised in “atmosphere of sex and breeding”,“marriage for the purpose of producing children and assuring continuity of ownership”, womens reproduction “completely integrated with their role in social life"

This paper has a unique history: started as blog post on naming trends in @DunLaoghaireTn (South #Dublin) for @PhilLawton & @geogsocire **| gained further motivation after seated next to a nun while flying to present this work for first time (great chat with Sister Catherine!)

Other fun facts on Irish names:
-One in five Irish girls were named Mary.
-Only 13 names cover about 70% of boys.
-No, I can’t help you pronounce Saoirse.

-Not a single Ashkenazi Jewish couple gave their own name to their children, while 20% of other couples did.

Read the full paper here -> osf.io/preprints/soca…

Original blogpost (@PhilLawton) -> irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/cul…

#Rstats #AcademicTwitter #EconTwitter

Published article link:
doi.org/10.1215/007033…