The useful voices are people who counted, experimented or historicised — not name-numerology entrepreneurs.
Read them as maps of a time and place. A U.S. résumé study is not a theory of Korean generation characters.
People
- Marianne Bertrand b. 1970 · Belgium / U.S. — Field experiment
Co-author of the Emily/Lakisha résumé study that made name-based callback gaps a standard citation.
- Sendhil Mullainathan b. 1973 · India / U.S. — Field experiment
Co-author of the same 2003/2004 audit; later work stays on how people use thin signals.
- Stanley Lieberson 1933–2018 · United States — Fashion theory
A Matter of Taste (2000) is the clearest argument that first names move like other fashions.
- Roland Fryer b. 1977 · United States — Name demography
With Steven Levitt, documented the late-20th-century rise of distinctively Black given names in U.S. data.
- Claudia Goldin b. 1946 · United States — Surnames & work
Historical work on family names and women’s labour-market identity shows how labels track institutions.
- Richard D. Alford 20th c. · United States — Ethnography
Naming and Identity surveyed how communities use names to place persons in social space.
Quote methods and years. Leave destiny vendors out of the bibliography.