Comments

Macartan Humphreys

Names

Fabulous data, fascinating questions

Encoding history in names

first names offer a unique advantage in authoritarian settings: they reflect family-level decisions more clearly than state-level statistics

Greek naming tradition—which prioritizes naming the first-born male and female after the paternal grandfather—creates analytical leverage to investigate family-level mechanisms and gendered dynamics.

Whats in a name?

My great great grandparents: Blennerhassett, Daniel, Ellen (x 3), Elizabeth, James (x 2), Maria, Margaret (x 2), Mary, Patrick, Richard, Stephen

My children: Aoife, Finbar; their cousins: Odhran, Tiernan, Oscar, Liam

  • Two departures

Theory

Alternative theories:

  • “mere preference falsification”
  • “internalization of regime norms”
  • “strategic effort to acquire dual identity capital.”

But: “is this within-family hedging”?

  • The hedging is intertemporal?
  • Who are the strategic actors: early generations or later generations; are early generations anticipating later generations?

Model

You describe model parameters but I am not seeing these used?

  • sounds fascinating
  • suggest bringing it in explicitly and using it to guide empirics more directly
  • question: what other micro variation is available?

Empirics

  • Is this post hoc? or a test?

Three treatments:

  1. 1945
  2. 1967
  3. 1991

all treated separately. But substantively distinct.

So: is this a story about one process or a particular combination of 3.

External validity

Which aspects of this travel?

Something general about 3rd generation?

Three different treatments at different time points

Paper structure

Feels like taken from dissertation

  • 30 page set up
  • 1 page results
  • 1 page dicusssion

Main results introduced in extremely short sections Show data without using the brealks; just mark the breaks