Baby names

(Though it's not the names of babies I'm concerned about, so much as their name when they grow up.)

The SSA website has some simple data queries for names. (I'd prefer access to the raw data and wonder if that's also available online.) Julian was born in 2007, and part of our goal was to pick a name that wasn't outlandish, but also wasn't all that popular. We settled on the 65th-most popular name given to boys in that year (in the US). I think we're catching an upward trend: Of course, this is rank (i.e. "200" means the 200th most popular name), so increased popularity is down. I'd prefer to plot "% of total boys given that name", if I could figure out how to extract that.

I'm surprised that there's only a factor of 3 difference between the most popular name (Jacob, in 2007 just over 1% of all boys) and Julian (about 0.3%). Anecdotally, it seems like everyone has a Jacob, Michael or Ethan, and I don't think I've met another J in his generation. Perhaps they're all in a different demographic, together on a distant social island.

For boys, the popularity decay constant over rank is at 52 (that is, the 52nd-most popular name is 1/e (37%) as popular as the 1st), suggesting that (in the first moment, at least) there is more variety in boys' names than girls: for girls, the 30th most popular name is 1/e as popular as 1st. Or, slicing another way, the 65th most popular girls name (Jennifer) was a factor of 5 less popular than number 1. I'm sure the Freakonomics guys have a theory about the difference in distribution, perhaps having to do with sex equality and Ivy League admissions.