Great post.

What’s the most downscale common Jewish surname? There’s probably less variance there, but it’s worth checking.

Try typing in “Soros”, or one of its early variants, like “Beelzebub “.

Shapiro is one of the more elite Ashkenazi surnames.

The physicist Max Tegmark changed his name from Shapiro because there were already so many academic physicists named Shapiro, including at least one Max Shapiro and several M. Shapiros.

“One might call this a ‘privilege’ factor”

One might also call it “strawberry popsicle squeeze farts,” but why?

I’m fairly certain a Lothrop Stoddard would take surname data as evidence of strong germ-plasm (or however he’s put it) associated with the more privileged surnames.

On the other hand, your Current-Year citizen would figure it’s unfair advantage engendered by a socially unjust environment.

Not bad, average Shen federal salary comes out to $115,771.72, despite Shen not being a particularly common Chinese surname! Unfortunately though, I doubt this represents any kind of privilege. As I’ve repeatedly been arguing, Asian Americans are actually the most openly discriminated against group in American society today.

I suspect more interesting than just looking at salary is also looking at what fields these people actually work in. Which groups of people in this country are disproportionately engaged in value creating STEM activities?

Let’s also not forget our uh good friend Ben Shapiro, aka The Hebrew Hammer.

Cohen is a name that has a hebrew meaning unlike some of the german yiddish jewish names:

Cohen is a Hebrew name (כהן) which literally means “priest” (mostly of the Jewish religion). It’s also a common Jewish surname which represents an ancient biblical priestly heritage.

from babynamewizrd.com

The name Smith meaning blacksmith has long been described as the most common among english speaking peoples. The number of present day Smiths cannot correspond to the percentage of actual working blacksmiths in the population at the time surnames were adopted. (how many blacksmiths does a society need?) It may show that blacksmiths were more successful at having numerous descendants.

Similarly the name Fletcher meaning arrow maker while uncommon is still less rare than one would think. How many full time arrow makers (arrowsmiths?) can there have been?

The intersection of linguistics and actual multi-layered meaning of words and names is a fascinating topic.

For example the word safe for a strong box is a seemingly mundane word until you realize that having a safe to store your valuables makes you feel “safe” connecting the two meanings of the word.

How is Shen your surname, Mr. Yan? Do you write your name with your given name first and family name last like Americans? Frankly, I’m offended by your appropriation of our Western ways! Next thing you know, you’ll be writing about rule-of-law, the Magna Carta, and the Constitution, or even taking tests without making an effort to obtain all the answers first. After that, it’ll be cooking different types of meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then writing with an alphabet that’s shorter than 3,000 characters. For shame! Your ancestors are probably rolling over in their graves still dissipated ashes stuck in an eddy in the Huang He delta.

I suspect more interesting than just looking at salary is also looking at what fields these people actually work in. Which groups of people in this country are disproportionately engaged in value creating STEM activities?

It’s the US Feral Government, Mr. Yan or Mr. Shen! What possible useful activities could any of those people on the list be doing?

Yeah, that’s probably statistically inevitable simply on account of how common it is (most common surname in Israel by a significant margin).

Non-Cohen and Levi surnames, though?

How about Cohen and Levy?
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com/federal-pay-rates/index.php?y=2016&n=cohen&l=&a=&o=

Cohen and Levy are the two most common surnames among Jews in the United States (Miller is third, as mentioned above). Another specifically Jewish surname is Israel, which is much less common. Jewish thought often divides Jews into three groups: Kohein, Levy and Israel.
Judaism 101: Jewish Names
http://www.jewfaq.org/jnames.htm

btw – 21 Timberlakes working for The Feds – https://www.fedsdatacenter.com/federal-pay-rates/index.php?y=2016&n=TIMBERLAKE&l=&a=&o=

My surname is a place-name, and I am taken to understand ultimately derives from “shelf” in Old English (though I’m not English) and “enclosure.” Which means I don’t know what.

Does it signify high, low, or inbetweeny status? I dunno. If the name were distinguished, I’d probably have heard more about my co-namers. As it is, I’m only familiar with a couple of celebrities with my name. Neither of whom are very accomplished, though one is hot. Or at least used to be.

Didn’t slaves in the US adopt the family names of their masters? That may skew the statistics…

strong germ-plasm… socially unjust environment

Blasé indifference is not a good argument.

It helps to notice that people rise and fall with some independence of the environment.

Could also be that prominence (as you put it) is negatively correlated with fame.

how many blacksmiths does a society need?

Don’t forget silversmiths and goldsmiths.

It may show that blacksmiths were more successful at having numerous descendants.

Hephaestus was married to Aphrodite, after all. I’m sure Roissy would have plenty to read into that.

How many full time arrow makers (arrowsmiths?) can there have been?

Considering that their descendants probably got into the gun business, quite a few. By that time names had already been set, so they wouldn’t have become Smiths despite being in effect gunsmiths.

Not mutually exclusive things. On average, compared to poorer people, wealthier people likely tend to have genes and customs more conducive to generating and keeping wealth. That doesn’t necessarily mean that many wealthier people don’t benefit from certain practices and systems that give them an unfair advantage. The fact that George W. Bush (who was average, at best, in both intelligence and ambition, and who never would have risen in social class had he been born poor) was elected president […twice…] proves beyond any reasonable doubt that “unfair advantage engendered by a socially unjust environment” is a major factor in the success of many people. The same of course could be said about Barack Obama (via different injustices) and probably Donald Trump too.

I’m going to sound like my surname is Smith (it’s not), but is that really fair?

Smiths were 1.01% of the US in 1990 and 0.83% in 2010. Adam Smith is probably in the top-100 of famous people from the Anglo-Saxon world–so it’s about expected value.

There are currently five Smiths in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate. So 6/535.

I would guess that, statistically, by law of large numbers, every common name will be slightly below average. They’re basically average, but get pushed down slightly by those relatively rare surnames that outperform.

Helen Shapiro, the singer, may not have been world famous but she was very famous in the UK in the early 1960s. She came from a poor family but I would guess that they are rich now.

Are there any black surnames? I thought Toney was black but then a quick image search showed some white faces.

Upon further reflection, I am forced to conclude that socialists and communists probably tend to be extremely stupid. I can’t think of any explanation besides sheer stupidity for why they haven’t made Paris Hilton their poster girl for everything wrong with our current socioeconomic system, because she basically does embody everything wrong with our society. In an ideal world, given her personal attributes, she would earn her bread through cleaning toilets. Unfortunately, she is very wealthy and famous, and this is 100% due to a combination of being born into a wealthy family and fitting a socially desirable (among a significant portion of the population who inexplicably seek to emulate her) archetype of the attractive, slutty, airhead, blonde mean girl. Any reasonable person would agree that she is the epitome of highly dysfunctional societal priorities and toxic socioeconomic incentive structures, yet leftists are silent about her.

I think that’s part of the point: all advantages are not due to unearned privilege, If Smiths make more than Jeffersons it might be earned not a sign of unfairness.

The name Smith meaning blacksmith has long been described as the most common among english speaking peoples. The number of present day Smiths cannot correspond to the percentage of actual working blacksmiths in the population at the time surnames were adopted. (how many blacksmiths does a society need?) It may show that blacksmiths were more successful at having numerous descendants.

At Wikipedia you can find some other reasons for the large number of present-day Smiths. For example, the name was often given to African-American slaves who retained it after emancipation and it was sometimes adopted by native Americans.

Senator Percy was also the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller IV. Now that’s a prestigious name.

Helen Shapiro was sort of a British Brenda Lee in the early sixties:

Shapiro, Pritzker…

Am I the only one with a SERIOUS case of Hebrew fatigue?!

Percy, such as the Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, is a Norman surname, like Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. The Normans conquered Britain in 1066 and people with French Norman surnames remain over-represented in the betters jobs in Britain today. Some of that is likely due to name-changing, and I’m not sure how true that is in the U.S.

But it remains a prestigious name. For example, when I moved to Chicago in 1982, Charles Percy was the Republican senator. He was mentioned as Presidential Timber from 1968 to 1988.

The Normans did not conquer Britain in 1066, it was just England.
But you have raised an important HBD point about the Percy family, though maybe you were unaware. The best way I can illustrate the point is to contrast them with the Campbell family. The head of the clan is the Duke of Argyll. From the C14th onwards, they expanded rapidly. Some of the clan were blood relative of the Duke, but as they expanded they absorbed clansfolk from other clans, who adopted the name Campbell. By the C17th the latter formed the overwhelming majority of the clan. By this time Campbell was a very common name. Add to that, there are Irish Campbells who have no connection to Scots Campbells whatsoever. Rather like the Scots and Irish Kennedys ( Kennedy is a much more common name in Scotland )
By contrast, the Percy have always been a small Northumbrian clan. The head of the clan was and is the Duke of Northumberland. The Campbells basically tried to take over most of Argyll ( not good if you were a MacDonald ) whereas the Percys remained in the Alnwick-Warkworth area and left the other clans ( Heron, Collingwood, Cuthbert etc ) in place. I suspect that nearly all those born with the Percy surname are related to each other from the Middle Ages onwards. They are not numerous, but I have never met a poor one. They all seem to have affluent lifestyles. Indeed, one of them was even the Councillor of the Ward I lived in. As well as that, they all seemed to have similar discreet, well-mannered characteristics – not what you would expect from relatives of Harry Hotspur.

The differences between” Mass Clans” and small, apparently related clans are often quite sharp. The former ( eg Campbells, MacDonalds etc ) have expanded by agglomeration. Comparatively few are related to each other or the main branch of the clan. They are a mixed bag of humanity.
Small clans seem often to be formed of related persons. This is particularly noticeable with small, aristocratic clans like the Percys. Another example are the Mars, Marrs or Erskines. All three surnames are associated with the Earldom of Mar ( the World’s oldest title ). Nearly all persons of these surnames are surmised to be related. As I said about the Percys, I’ve never met a poor one. And that goes for the ones who changed their names as well – like The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, who changed his name from ( low class Irish ) Maher to ( aristocratic Scots ) Marr. Instant Surname Privilege !

One peculiarity is the popularity of Miller among people of British descent. In Medieval Britain millers were rather unpopular, with a reputation for price-gouging farmers, so one would imagine that few of them used that surname.
A likely explanation is that most Millers are Anglicized from Muller, grain millers not having been as unpopular in the German-speaking world.

I beg to differ!! I believe the most famous would be Anna Nicole Smith!

All this brings to mind the rather bizarre (at least to a Westerner) high frequency of certain Asian names, in their country of origin like Nguyen in Vietnam, or Kim in Korea, or to a lesser extent, Wang in China. All countries with a history of Confucianism and communism.

It may be just a coincidence based the single character writing system, but it seems to me that having fewer unique names would help with any ostensibly social-minded philosophy. People may also be a tiny bit more willing to go along with Communism, if they don’t have a uniquely bourgeois name.

Tinsmith, locksmith, coppersmith, pewtersmith, gunsmith…

How many full time arrow makers (arrowsmiths?) can there have been?

More than you might think. During a battle of the Hundred Years War the English army might shoot off ten thousand plus arrows each minute.

An arrow takes a LOT more time to make than a cartridge, especially when made by hand.

Also, it is probable most arrows of the time were made by farmers during the winter slow season. Not necessarily full-time fletchers at all.

I dunno: Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Anna Nicole Smith, The Smiths, uh… Aerosmith,…

The Percy’s were a wealthy family where I grew up, the most prominent being the novelist Walker Percy.

I have a privileged sounding name (it has a walk-on part in the life of Shakespeare) but my people take a $7,000 hit compared to the $83,000 Federal Govt average.

Won’t a lot of ethic sounding names be concentrated on the coasts where salaries are higher, so that old stock folks with assets look relatively less privileged?

When I map the office locations of federal employees with my last name, they are conspicuously fly-over types.

But come to think of it, there’s a lot of brawlers with my name when I search for it.

My surname is pretty uncommon and sounds fancy to people, although a certain number of its bearers are black. For example, I suspect that the federal employee who has my last name and the first name Theodoshia may well not be White Like Me.

Anyway, the database also shows 110 federal employees who have my surname, which I find shockingly high. In a half-century of consciousness, I’ve never randomly run across a single person with my surname, even with one of its several variant spellings. But I’ve met several Shapiros, who are represented in that database at the same rate.

I’m way too lazy to average these people’s salaries, by the way: maybe I should be working for the federal government.

Smiths are extremely common, but tend not to be world famous.

There are many variations on Smith, including the German version Schmidt, Russian Kuznetsov, French Lebrun, Spanish Herrera, Italian Ferrero.

A German variant would be Eisenhower, a hewer of iron. A Messerschmitt would be a maker of knives.

For example, Hamilton is the best educated common surname in Britain and it’s the name of the most expensive ticket Broadway musical of all time in the U.S.

But is Huntington, a fairly rare but overachieving name in the U.S., as upscale in Britain?

At the most simple level Hamilton is a town in Scotland and Huntingdon is a town in England. Education in Scotland is often believed to be better than in England.

However it is much more complicated that that. The Earls of Arran in Scotland have the family name Hamilton, and title of Earls of Huntingdon was created several times, but appears not to be associated with the town, which is best known as the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell and Samuel Pepys.

So people who have the names might be associated with the aristocratic families, or just named after the towns.

Further complicating factor is that Hamilton was the name of a hamlet in England, and the local family established itself in Scotland then founded a place named after the family. So this is rather like the pattern of arrival in the US giving places names that reminded them of home.

Huntingdon,near Cambridge, is not very far from Boston, which I believe has a place in New England named after it that has a suburb named Cambridge, even though there is no River Cam in Boston, Mass.

Hamilton in Scotland has a soccer team with the marvelous tongue twister name Hamilton Academicals.

https://www.hamiltonacciesfc.co.uk/

Miss Shapiro is not well known either.

There are about 100 notable Shapiro’s.

Wouldn’t black people throw a monkey (no pun intended) wrench into this analysis. American blacks often took the names of their plantation owners or even founding fathers. (Indeed, I mentioned to my daughter the other day that I’d never met a white person with the last name of Washington or Jefferson, but I’ve seen plenty of blacks with those surnames.)

Surnames that have a lot of overlap between blacks and whites would skew the result toward less surname privilege since blacks tend to earn less. This would be particularly true on a list of government employee surnames since blacks are dramatically overrepresented in government workers.

The Percys have been Dukes or Earls of Northumberland since 1403 , and were and are some of the biggest landholders in England. They still make lists of the top twenty wealthy British families. One of them was a British army commander in the American War of Independence.

This database illustrates the fact that while working for the federal government has its advantages, one big downside is that your salary is a matter of public record. That’s something you’d never see in the private sector.

He made it up. Riffing on Greek words pronounced with silent P in English: pseudo, pneumonia, psoriasis.

Steve,
did you ever square dance? Maybe your kids learned square dancing in school. Like many other Americans of your vintage, you may be part of an unwitting experiment.

https://qz.com/1153516/americas-wholesome-square-dancing-tradition-is-a-tool-of-white-supremacy/

In junior high (in Boston) there were twins with the surname B’Smith, written exactly like that.

Not a bad voice for age 14.

Sort of related: if you speak a bunch of languages, you’ll realize that the tendency for poor people to give their children whacky names is universal. Must have something to do with magical thinking and the belief in the power of a sound.

Regarding Huntingdon, I should perhaps have added that in 1601 a man called Munday wrote a play about Robin Hood in which it is claimed that Hood was the Earl of Huntingdon.

This was probably an attempt to give a social upgrade to the renowned socialist who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, a quaint notion that predates the modern tendency to reverse the process.

The current Earl of Huntingdon is William Edward Robin Hood Hastings-Bass, 17th Earl of Huntingdon, who came from a family of wealthy racehorse trainers and trained horses for the Queen. Since his retirement he has taken part in charity work, driving a truckload of supplies to Bosnia and taking part in bike ride across Borneo and a safari in the Australian outback.

On the other hand, there don’t appear to have been any world famous Shapiros

Robert Shapiro (OJ’s lawyer)? Ben Shapiro?

The Scottish Hamiltons are the highest ranking peers in Scotland, and are, to the very best of my knowledge, the only noble family of British aborigine origin. The male line carries the I2a “Isles” haplogroup, interesting to me only because I am also of the same haplogroup. Most nobles in Britain, and indeed all over Europe, are one form of Indo-European line or another.
“Haplogroup I is the oldest major haplogroup in Europe and in all probability the only one that originated there (apart from very minor haplogroups like C1a2 and deep subclades of other haplogroups).” From Eupedia.com.
I2a was the haplogroup of the first modern humans to inhabit the British Isles. They were overwhelmed near to the point of extinction by the Indo-Europeans.

I think the most famous Shapiro is Robert.

Never really noticed many ‘Huntington’s’ in the UK.

Probably derives from ‘Huntingdon’ the name of a town and former (very small) county in East Anglia.

Apparently, although virtually all Hamiltons are of Scottish provenance, the name is actually of English origin. It is, (or so it is said), apparently derived from a suburb of midland city of Leicester of the same name.
Some noble or another took it to Scotland back in the day.
Surprisingly, the very Scottish surname ‘Graham’ is also of English derivation, being derived from the town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, which happens, of course, to be Maggie Thatcher’s hometown.

Blacksmithing in England and the US was traditionally represented in as a virile trade (on the contrary, tailoring was represented as unmanly in tunes like “The Devil Among The Tailors” (like ‘cat among the pigeons’) and songs like I’ll Go And List For A Sailor). You certainly needed (or developed) strong arms.

“Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns what’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man. ”

And coppersmiths.

All New Jersey public employees, whether local, county, or state, have their salaries as part of the public record.

It would be hard to think of more famous surnames than those of American mafioso or Italian artists but I am not aware if Italian names bear any relation to social status/origins. Any Italians know?

Interesting that half the privilege of Shapiros working for the feds is attributable to the 12% of them that are medical officers in HHS or the VA. The latter pays way more, by the way, but I’d guess that neither offers relatively prestigious gigs as far as medicine goes.

my Great Great Grandfather was a Blacksmith in Pennsylvania, but his surname was McCormick…he was Scots-Irish and was a veteran of the civil war…..his wife was a direct descendant of John Morton (a signer of the Declaration)

The problem with surname analysis is marriage, remember Margret the grocer’s daughter was a Roberts and only married into the thatcher name, though I believe denis was a pretty high up in the chem co she worked at after getting her degree. And Roberts is in be of those names that are largely class independant , although higher up than my surname based on a nickname of a community n man indicate a lower class origini

I have one read that in Germany still up today people called “Schmidt” (in english Blacksmith) are on average heavier than people called Schneider (tailor).

Interesting. A small quibble: since the average federal Sailer salary is about $17K below the overall average, -$17K should be termed the “privilege offset,” not “privilege factor” (a “factor” being a number by which something is multiplied). Alternatively, since $17K is about 20% of $83K, you could assign to Sailer a privilege factor of 0.80.

I put in my surname, which is common among Tamil Brahmins, got 9 hits

Average = $158 K
Min = 99 k
Max = 206 k

I ran it for the surname Kelly and got 1084 results. Seven of those had a $0 salary, which I excluded. Average Kelly salary is $87,482.56.

For what it’s worth, 5 Kellys work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, but no Shapiros do.

“For example, Hamilton is the best educated common surname in Britain and it’s the name of the most expensive ticket Broadway musical of all time in the U.S.”

And it’s also the name of Judge Reinhold’s character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

The 12% is staggering. A more nuanced formula could probably factor things like that in.

For what it’s worth, my guess is that the doctors Shapiro have thought very hard about and maximized their career choices. Considering things like loan forgiveness and other benefits, these gigs are probably pretty good deals for them even if not particularly prestigious.

But that’s really an aside. This is just a comparison of federal employees and Shapiros in the federal government are clearly outperforming the average fed.

Washington, Jefferson, Jackson are almost exclusively black surnames in the U.S. As are Montgomery and Williams, but a little less so.

Choudhury does pretty well thanks to the doctors employed at the VA. It means landlord\head of community etc. and is used by both Hindus and Muslims in the Indian sub-continent.

Isn’t that ‘Smythe’ rather than ‘Smythes’?

Maybe there is a tendency for upscale Smiths to become Smythes. But downwardly mobile Smythes might feel the urge to change to Smith to fit in? This would bed in the surname privilege over time.

Shapiro is also the name of the family that owned Familian Pipe & Supply from 1962 to 1987. Familian was a well-known plumbing wholesaler in California, Nevada, and Hawaii.

In the US, has there been white flight from those surnames?

I have a basic, working knowledge of German but admittedly didn’t know that the word for “rope” is “seil” (pr. “zile”). So… “Der Seiler” would indeed translate to “ropemaker”.

Which proves an old adage to be true–you DO learn something new every day.

Tschuss!!

His uncle William was probably more representative of that branch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alexander_Percy

his surname was McCormick

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/more-cowbell-with-will-ferrell-on-snl-video-saturday-night-live-nbc/3506001?snl=1

You can do a similar thing with contributors to presidential candidates. I think it works out that Jews provide 60% of the funding for democrats for instance.

I can’t find the info for 2016, but the idea is to search for surnames – Levy, Smith, Sanchez etc. Then see how much they’ve contributed in total, for each party. Then search database for how many of the population has the surname to work out roughly what ethnic group controls the party. Jews dominate, Whites are middle ranking, and Hispanics don’t give much at all. Black are hard to separate, because of the similar surname to Whites.

So true: an obvious, but very important, mathematical fact! I guess the family name effect as to rely, heavily, on the right kind of assortative mating.

“Cohen” and variants denote membership in ancient Judaism’s priestly caste (similar to Brahmins), who (historically and in Orthodox Judaism) are also outright forbidden to marry gentiles, converts or half-Jews, so if it isn’t a particularly prestigious surname it would seem to contradict both the thesis of this post and HBD explanations for Ashkenazi achievement.

My great uncle roomed with him at Sewanee. Lanterns on the Levee is a good book.

Hephaestus was married to Aphrodite, after all. I’m sure Roissy would have plenty to read into that.

Of course, she was cheating on him with Ares….

But the minstrel struck the chords in prelude to his sweet lay and sang of the love of Ares and Aphrodite of the fair crown, how first they lay together in the house of Hephaestus secretly; and Ares gave her many gifts, and shamed the bed [270] of the lord Hephaestus.

Odyssey, Book 8

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D8%3Acard%3D250

Hamiltons might be descended from a lonely aborigine elite member who joined the invading Indo-Europeans (we could also say he betrayed his native people).

Male ‘I’ groups in Europe are the indigenous population. They are most numerous in places where European native population found shelter during Ice Age. Then they expanded back up north. Europe looked suddenly very attractive after the Ice Age ended, and the ‘I’ natives were over-run by waves of Indo-Europeans, Anatolians, farmers and sheep-herders from Middle East, etc…

Interestingly enough the ‘I’ DNA groups is closer to the Middle-Eastern ‘J’ DNA groups than to the Indo-European ‘R1a-b’ groups.

Anther oddity is the large percentage of royal-aristocrat male DNA that has tested as a group ‘G’. (E.g. Capetians, Bavarian royals, bones of dead warriors, Otzi was also a ‘G’, etc…). G is a rare group in Europe (or world-wide), but it has a strong cluster in the Caucasus mountains, where Ossetians are majority G. People with male G DNA are heavily associated with spread of highland pastoral lifestyle, and with spread of metallurgy. Possibly some combination of bronze/iron weapons, horses, and high mobility made them into an ancient source of many high-born families. Too bad we don’t have any surnames that would be associated with them (or Capetians?).

‘Cohen’ and ‘Levi’ are specially protected names in Israel.

It’s illegal to change your name to ‘Cohen’ or ‘Levi’ in Israel. (There may be a couple of other legally protected names in Israel, but those are the two I’m aware of).

That’s why there’s the joke that so many Russians in Israel change their name to ‘Lavi’. Because they all wanted to change their name to ‘Levi’ when they arrive in Israel – and then find out that it’s not allowed to, so they end up with ‘Lavi’.

—————-

As for high-achieving or low-achieving. Names like ‘Cohen’ and ‘Levi’ will not be different from average – as they are found both equally in Middle Eastern and European populations (probably even more common with Middle Eastern demographics).

Descalzzo and it’s variants means shoeless an ancestor so poor they went barefoot.

Wouldn’t black people throw a monkey (no pun intended) wrench into this analysis. American blacks often took the names of their plantation owners or even founding fathers. (Indeed, I mentioned to my daughter the other day that I’d never met a white person with the last name of Washington or Jefferson, but I’ve seen plenty of blacks with those surnames.)

Yeah. Take, say, Washington. In the normal course of affairs, it would probably have a fairly upscale valence, but, due to its extreme popularity among Blacks ( a very downmarket demographic), it has prolish connotations in the USA and possibly beyond. If memory serves, HL Mencken has an anecdote about a German hotel being worried that a guest with the Washington surname might be Black….

Aren’t tens of thousands of blacks named Pinckney after the owner of one of the biggest plantations in S Carolina.

“Cohen” and variants denote membership in ancient Judaism’s priestly caste (similar to Brahmins), who (historically and in Orthodox Judaism) are also outright forbidden to marry gentiles, converts or half-Jews, so if it isn’t a particularly prestigious surname it would seem to contradict both the thesis of this post and HBD explanations for Ashkenazi achievement.

Or maybe the priestly caste wasn’t very high-achieving…..

If you had a literate upscale job like clerk (Clark or Palmer), you are likely to be a little upscale today.

The Jewish equivalent of Clark would have to be Soffer/Sofer/Sopher/Sofaer. The sample turns out to be small, unfortunately: one Soffer in the $180,000s, and three Sophers down in the dumps.

But look up “Rabin” (“rabbi”). There are about 55 Rabins, Rabinowitz’s (“son of the rabbi”) etc, and the average salary looks pretty high, just eyeballing it.

Melamed/Melomed/Malamud/Lehrer/Lehrman/Lehrmann/Lerman (teacher) would be a good one to look up, for anyone willing to do the work.

Helen Shapiro, the singer, may not have been world famous but she was very famous in the UK in the early 1960s.

Ah, yes, I remember her well!

There are about a dozen Trumps there, and their average is lower middle class at best. This being 2016 data, Donald wasn’t yet there to pull up the average.

Surname spelling gets complicated:

Pewitt, Preuett, Preuit, Preuitt, Prewet, Prewett, Prewiett, Prewit, Prewitt, Priuett, Priuitt, Prouett, Prouitt, Prueite, Prueitt, Pruet, Pruett, Pruette, Pruewitt, Pruiett, Pruit, Pruitt, Pruitte

They came to America through Virginia, mostly.

Tennessee has the largest concentration of people with the surname Pewitt.

Cohen is found in both European and Middle Eastern populations. But it seems to be more common in Middle Eastern origin families in Israel than in European origin ones. Economic achievement is affected more by the country of origin from which different populations immigrated, than by who has more prestigious surnames within those different populations.

Amongst the Jews – I would guess a positive correlation with those with the most specifically German surnames and income, as these (‘the Yekkes’, as German Jews are called in Israel) are the historical demographic which was most successfully assimilated to secular life within Europe, prior to emigration. In Israel, German surname families like the Wertheimer family and the Strauss family are very dominant. I’d guess surnames like ‘Oppenheimer’ will have a strong correlation with income.

Would there be a way to control for that? Most demographic data has a racial component. Though, anecdotally, ive never met a white Washington, or Jefferson, for that matter.

Though, it’s interesting. My (white) wife’s maiden name was Davis. If she wore something with her surname on it she often received odd looks or even comments that, “Her daddy must be black.” Funny how it works. Most Davises I had met up to that point were white – squarely middle class white.

Smith just means maker. So anyone who made things could have the name Smith.

An apparent limitation to the database is that it doesn’t include Department of Defense civil servants, a significant fraction of the total. For instance, searching “Wright Patterson AFB” yields a single employee of the Small Business Administration, not a list of the 20K+ civilians employed there.

I have no idea whether this exclusion makes the list more or less representative of the “surname privilege” for the nation as a whole. But a look through the Air Force phone directory shows that the names at least are slightly better balanced: 34 Shapiros (7 civil servants, 8 contractors, 8 officers, 10 enlisted, 1 undetermined) vs 5 Sailers (1 civilian, 1 contractor, 1 officer, 2 enlisted).

Washington and Jefferson? Maybe that’s just tv and movie characters, meant to remind whites why blacks are here in the first place.

Paris is as good a business woman as her ancestor who built the hotel chain.
Her parents were actually poor relations.

She made multi millions marketing herself as a dumb blonde and she retired years ago.

She started out with that reality show with Nicole Ritchie. They traveled the country working at minimum wage jobs and meeting ordinary people It was the best reality show ever.

The emphasis was on the places they went and the people they met. It was a tour of America Instead of sneering at flyover country and the deplorables, her show admired the deplorables and flyover country.

All she needed was some seed money from her family for a good PR agency and she was off.

Who knows what she’s really like?

I thought Palmer was someone who had been in a pilgrimage?

Helen Shapiro had the misfortune to go on tour in 1963 and be upstaged by one of her supporting acts, four lads from Liverpool. Lennon and McCartney wrote a song called “Misery” for her, but she never recorded it.

She continued in show business for many years, playing the role of Nancy in the London stage version of Oliver! and traveling for many years as a singer with jazzman Humphrey Littleton.

Her autobiography, published in 1993, was entitled Walking Back to Happiness, the title of her greatest hit. Just as well she did not record Misery, really!

Haven’t noticed that (though now I’ll be on the lookout) but I see black girls with comically misspelled French names all the time.

RKM engine was proposed by the physicist/poet Boris Shapiro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RKM_engine

There’s well-known Israeli mathematician Ilya Shapiro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Piatetski-Shapiro

On Russian wikipedia there’s a huge list of famous people with the surname.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE

——–

Although the information is not useful until we know what the number of people with this surname are in the respective countries.

Edit – 24,000 people with this surname in the United States.

The Arabic equivalent for Smith or blacksmith is Haddad, an extremely common name in Arab countries. The vast majority are, of course, Muslim but many are also Christian and even a few are Mizrachic Jews.

Yeah. Take, say, Washington. In the normal course of affairs, it would probably have a fairly upscale valence, but, due to its extreme popularity among Blacks ( a very downmarket demographic), it has prolish connotations….

I loved this routine. It’s weird, though…Cheech and Chong sure got a historical pass from the MSM on the skits they used to do, like this one and Blind Melon Chittlins and Up His Nose it Goes. Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1940’s and 50’s and old movies with black maids and train porters get trotted out regularly and nailed for “racism”, but Cheech and Chong go largely unscathed.

Surname Privilege Factor

Last week Steve told us that he wasn’t related to a guy with a very similar last name who had murdered someone. Now another criminal with a similar last name was just shot by a cop. I suppose he’s going to say he’s not related to him, either.

http://www.1011now.com/content/news/Man-taken-to-hospital-after-shots-fired-short-pursuit-with-LPD-468195293.html

I wonder how many Shapiros get arrested compared to everyone else?

McCormick or McCormack (Irish equivalent) is a common patronymic in Scotland and Ireland meaning son of Charles. The Scandinavian equivalent is Carlson (Sweden)/Carlsen (Denmark, Norway).

I have a fairly common Anglo surname (something like the 150 most common in the US), but damn 500 employed by the feds seems high. It does seem like the lower salaried names seem disproportionately black and the top ones are extra WASPy (William, Robert, John, Richard, etc),

Or maybe the priestly caste wasn’t very high-achieving…..

Hard to say. But considering that the priesthood ended around 70AD, the Cohen genes have had a very long time to work their way through the population.

This is the same in Russia. Most people (serfs/peasants) took the surnames of their former owners, or alternatively place-names. As recently as first half of the 19th century most people (peasants) in Russian Empire did not have or need a surname.

Speaking of rabbis, it’s worth looking up the Greek equivalent: these would be all the names beginning with “Papa” (“priest”) and ending with “ou” or “os” (Greek case endings, don’t ask…) There’ll be something (possibly long) in between, typically a given name. Hence Papadopoulos, Papademetriou, Papandreou. Some of them will actually be Romanian, but that’s ok because Greek-surnamed Romanians were often aristocrats. For anyone willing to do the work…

Too bad the smartest Roman Catholics were sworn to celibacy.

Obviously the real privilege which stands out is federal employment. The mean and median for federal worker’s salaries are going to be pretty close as there are few incredibly highly compensated workers skewing the average higher. Compared to median U.S. households, federal workers make around 40-50% more. That number is obviously going to be much higher comparing black households and black households with a federal worker.

And Smith’s cousins, the Wrights: Ark, Mill, Ship.

Recently had my hair cut by a woman named Uniqua. No kidding.

And yet, in ancient times the smith was represented as lame, like Hephaestus. Some accounts (like the entry in the Oxford Classical Dictionary) attribute the depiction as realistic since lame individuals would be useless in soldiering or most agricultural tasks but could assist the community in the smithy. Another reason put forward (?by Robert Graves?) was that smiths were deliberately hobbled to prevent them marketing their invaluable skills elsewhere.

In his “Vanished Kingdoms” essay on the Welsh Kingdom of Strathclyde, Norman Davies makes a good case for the name Campbell (“broken or twisted mouth” in Scots Gaelic) as evidence that the family were holdouts speaking the old tongue when the population around them had switched to Gaelic with the influx of Irish.

More generally, the book “Names” by Basil Cottle is outstanding.

“all advantages are not due to unearned privilege”

They want you to think “unearned privilege” when you hear “privilege,” which is a dirty trick. Much like with “racism,”–which combines the desire to throw all members of a despised race into gas chambers with innocuously noticing people of a certain color are better at basketball–it’s a slippery term. You can’t pin them down.

Arguably the greatest mathematician in the second half of the 20th-century is a Shapiro, if he had taken his father’s surname.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck

Some names are just appropriations, like Chanel or Porsche, although not too many Portias.

“which I find shockingly high”

There are a LOT of federal employees.

Or maybe the priestly caste wasn’t very high-achieving…..

Hard to say. But considering that the priesthood ended around 70AD, the Cohen genes have had a very long time to work their way through the population.

Then there’s the question of percentages…..How much Cohen DNA does the average Ashkenazi have…..Useful to remember that the key factor in high Ashkenazi IQ was the fact that they specialized in White Collar trades (estate management, tax-farming, etc)….Perhaps the certified Cohens had less get-up-and-go…..

Too bad the smartest Roman Catholics were sworn to celibacy.

But not their brothers and sisters. The dysgenic effects of priestly celibacy have been overrated …..

Since one can type in first name also, I tried with D’honte, Laquisha, Deshawn.

Nothing.

Must be institutional racism.

Perhaps another try: http://takimag.com/article/the_jacksun_also_rises_jim_goad/print ….

My surname has an average of 91.000, so moderate privilege on my part. It makes sense – mine is a Scottish surname. There are some distinguished people (both British and American) who have had it,
(the name was even used in one movie as the name of a snobby prep school). But there are also a fair amount of scots-irish redneck types who have it. The distribution of job titles seems to follow this…

Oriental countries do seem to have inherited a rather limited range of surnames compared with most Western countries, though it should be remembered that in Wales for example something like 30 surnames account for 90% of the population.

The name Smith meaning blacksmith has long been described as the most common among english speaking peoples.

How many Smiths were originally Schmidts, Lefebvres, Ferraros, Ferreros, Smitses, Goffs, or Kovacs?

Note: Commenter Jonathan Mason stated the same in Comment #40.

“Any reasonable person would agree that she (Paris Hilton) is the epitome of highly dysfunctional societal priorities and toxic socioeconomic incentive structures, yet leftists are silent about her.”

She’s female, therefore has what in the UK are now officially called “protected characteristics”.

A male equivalent, a wealthy blond frat-boy type who screwed his way though the world, would probably be in jail or on the run like Haven Monahan.

On the other hand, as far as I know, Tucker Max is still at liberty.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-new-dating-game/article/416267

I thought Kraft was always an elite name. Yet, there is a prominent WN in NorCal who manages to get arrested once a month for very sordid crimes (assault with a deadly weapon, having sex in public, shoplifting, etc.). The nature of these crimes indicates poor impulse control and zero long-term thinking.

The two-year gap between otherwise-monthly arrests was only because he went to a different town :

http://mugshotssantacruz.com/search/?last_name=KRAFT&first_name=KEVIN&#prof

https://www.google.com/search?ei=l4tSWo6eCMXojwTjsJ6YCg&q=Kevin+Crawford+Kraft+arrests&oq=Kevin+Crawford+Kraft+arrests&gs_l=psy-ab.3..35i39k1l2.13686.16702.0.16825.17.12.1.0.0.0.154.939.0j8.8.0….0…1c.1.64.psy-ab..8.9.939….0.pSkp_vjpk6s

Has the Kraft name devolved?

I wonder if Patel is one of the highest-income surnames in America at this point (again, measuring income only).

Remember that many ultra-rich don’t have to report their full income on their 1040, as it is shielded through structures before that. So this does not capture the income of the ultra-wealthy.

Kowalski in Polish and related Slavic names are also variations on Smith.

There is no Huntingdon MA, not near Cambridge or anywhere else. There’s a Huntington MA which is in the western part of the state past Springfield/Northampton.

Davis is a fairly common name among Jews, which makes sense as it is derived from David.

Well, and then what? Relying on the siblings provides no mechanism for accumulating any genetic advantage.

Imagine a uniform initial population of Jews. The smartest guy in the family becomes a rabbi. He marries the prettiest girl in town, or the richest: both ways, he tends to have more offspring. Now his smartest son becomes a rabbi…etc.

Now start with a uniform population of Roman Catholics. Smartest boy in the family becomes a priest or a monk: then nothing. His siblings are nothing special (remember we started from a uniform population). Ok, maybe that smart boy’s status as a priest improves his siblings’ prospects on the marriage market. But they’re still just average, so all that gets you is more children from average people.

If you wanted to breed a really big dog, how far would you get if you castrated the biggest puppy of every litter?

…and Kowalski.

What’s Jewish for that anyway? Eisner?

If “Smith” is common socially, then “Smithson”, the mere son of a smith, should be even more so.
But in fact it is perhaps the grandest English name of all, at least once it was transmogrified into “Percy” by the heir to the eponymous estates and, ultimately, the first Duke of Northumberland of the third creation.
And, of course, an illegitimate son of the house gave us the Smithsonian.

OT: The NYT wrote about alt-right men dating asian women, including John Derbyshire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/alt-right-asian-fetish.html

Very curious story. The father was born a Haredi – that turned into a some type of travelling liberal revolutionary. Cheated death in Tsarist dungeon. Chased out by Bolsheviks – eventually killed by the Nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sascha_Schapiro

Well, and then what? Relying on the siblings provides no mechanism for accumulating any genetic advantage.

Elementary genetics. If I don’t reproduce but both of my siblings do……

Imagine a uniform initial population of Jews. The smartest guy in the family becomes a rabbi.

Does he? Maybe the guy who becomes a rabbi is the one who likes sitting around….

He marries the prettiest girl in town, or the richest: both ways, he tends to have more offspring. Now his smartest son becomes a rabbi…etc.

My understanding is that the old idea of rabbis marrying the daughters of wealthy men is exaggerated….

Now start with a uniform population of Roman Catholics. Smartest boy in the family becomes a priest or a monk: then nothing.

Is he the smartest boy in the family? Perhaps he’s just the most pious….

Ok, maybe that smart boy’s status as a priest improves his siblings’ prospects on the marriage market. But they’re still just average,

Since heredity plays a role in IQ, odds say that the siblings of a guy with an above average IQ will also have above average IQs……

Highly interesting, thank you.
I agree about the Percys – I too have never met a poor one.
I do happen to know, on the other, that a family of lower class Erskines live, not only in Scotland, but actually in Alloa, the site of the historic seat of the Earls of Mar.
Servants who took the name, or perhaps an illegitimate branch? In any case, they are always courteously treated by the head of the family.

But it seems to be more common in Middle Eastern origin families in Israel than in European origin ones.

A lot of the European ones are called Katz rather than Cohen. And then there’s also Kagan/Kogan.

Not bad, average Shen federal salary comes out to $115,771.72, despite Shen not being a particularly common Chinese surname! Unfortunately though, I doubt this represents any kind of privilege. As I’ve repeatedly been arguing, Asian Americans are actually the most openly discriminated against group in American society today.

What the Asian-Americans giveth, the Asian-Americans taketh away on USB flash drives.

The earls of Huntington are distinguished, and their surname is Hastings, which also tends to be the same. The surname Huntington on the other hand is of no particular distinction in England.
Hamilton is the most distinguished aristocratic name in Scotland – two dukedoms, two earldoms, a viscountcy, two baronies, three baronetcies, and four families of the landed gentry; all this without counting the extinct titles.
I would wager then that something like 90% of the Oxford and Cambridge graduates bearing this name were scions of one or another of these families.

It could be that Smith was a relatively large proportion of a certain smaller class of artisans that grew to a larger proportion of the overall population as the country became more middle class in general.

Smith just means maker. So anyone who made things could have the name Smith.

That was my understanding too, until I checked Wikipedia, where it is claimed to mean someone who makes things with metal (confirmed by my 1970 Oxford Dictionary).

Of course, these things can become updated. Did you know that one reputable dictionary (it might be the Oxford) now accepts that literally can mean metaphorically because it is a common usage. When I heard that, I was literally gobsmacked.

Washington was the first name I tried. Over 1,000 results. Interestingly, the top paid Shapiros are all physicians while for the top paid Washingtons you see only a couple physicians and a fair amount of jobs like “Miscellaneous Administration.” There also appear to be about 400 Washingtons working for the VA.

I satisfied myself that yes indeed, there were a few $200k+ bearers of my surname. And then there were a few hundred of our ne-er in-laws and pretenders eking out $30-40k – at least they were employed is all I can say for their efforts.

I only got so far, but I figure the first hundred or so results just happened to be a poor sample and there must have been a good many $250k+ guys hanging out at the back with names like Terence, William and Xavier.

What the Asian-Americans giveth, the Asian-Americans taketh away on USB flash drives.

Yep, like info on every federal employee and all security clearance applications, including mine, from OPM. Now in the hands of the ChiComs.

Did I mention that a female POC was head of OPM at the time, and that no one was punished?

Is he the smartest boy in the family? Perhaps he’s just the most pious….

Or maybe he just wants to be a fabulous entertainer, the star of the show every Sunday, with a great excuse for not having to marry and a supply of willing altar boys.

Kogan is just very common Russian spelling of Cohen. Although nowadays the name spread around a lot to people which are hardly Cohens in the original sense. At my college there was a blonde, cross-wearing (Christian) girl with the surname.

Not to mention that a man who rose far in the medieval Church was likely to be in a position to raise his relatives status…

C of E offspring took a slightly different path, where younger son(s) went into the priesthood since elder brothers had staked out the primogeniture and military roles.

McGowan is also Smithson.

They even linked to an unz.com comment (“As a commenter wrote on an alt-right forum…”). (The commenter is A. Karlin though.)

Hi, mom!

All Wertheimers are related, as are all Oppenheimers. But these are fairly recent families, which took their name from their towns of origin. Frankfurter too, although from such a big place many families of the name may well have issued forth.
I am reminded of the following wonderful story, too good to be true I fear:
Emperor Franz Josef was a very punctilious man, and never shirked his duty. At the end of a long day, he was about to take off his uniform when a courtier entered the room with an embarrassed look: might His Imperial and Royal Highness spare a few moments for His Serene Highness the Prince of Loewenstein – Wertheim – Rosenberg?
The Emperor’s hearing was not what it had been: “Doch, doch”, he murmured, “escort the three old Jews in!”

Recently had my hair cut by a woman named Uniqua. No kidding.

I know a women named Perma, unfortunately she is not a hairdresser, but she tells me her name is even uniquer than Uniqua.

Also with reference to a lack of federal employees named Laquisha as mentioned in a post above, I believe the name is more commonly spelled either as Lakeisha or as Lakesha, and, surprisingly to me, it is also used as a white name. Actually I know a white Lakesha.

The problem with made-up names is that if you are uneducated, you may well given your child the name of an unpleasant disease without knowing it. It has always baffled me that there is a chain of shoe stores called The Athletes Foot, apparently oblivious of the fact, or perhaps because of the fact that athlete’s foot is a fungal infection that grows between the toes.

Of course it all depends where you are. In England I once met an American man called Randolph Hornblower, who said that in the US everyone called him “Horny”. It was a relief for him to arrive in Britain where people asked him if he was “Randy”.

I don’t have the exact numbers, but my well-educated guess is American Jews are north of 95% Ashkenazi, with the remainder mostly nouveau riche, gold-chain-wearing recent Persian and Israeli immigrants. It’s safe to assume any American named Cohen, Cohn, Kohn et al is 100% Ashkenazi, or at least 0% other-kinds-of-Jews.

That was supposed to be ‘ne’er do well’.

Bob Shapiro was the CEO of Monsanto.

And Smith’s cousins, the Wrights: Ark, Mill, Ship.

Not to mention Cart and Wain, but Play never seems to have become a surname.

I had googled Margaret Thatcher since I remembered her maiden name was Roberts (Welsh patrynomic & all that). I was curious to see if she had any recent Welsh forbears but instead shockingly enough her father’s grandmother was Irish Catholic (Sullivan no less). This is of course the Iron Lady we are speaking of who survived the IRA and it was a fact I had never known about.

It prompts me to reflect that despite the Famine & pogroms (which were horrific historical experiences) one of the main gripes of Irish Catholic & Jewish communities is that to socially advance they had to assimilate into WASP society in the 19th & 20th centuries.

In those cases assimilation meant giving up a particularly tenaciously held religious-cultural identity that had survived so much and to somehow let it go for societal advancement seemed churlish, almost cowardly. It’s interesting that all discrimination simply melted away when these two groups gave up the Pope & the Synagogue so it wasn’t really founded on race (an Anglo-Irish was simply a Protestant Irishman).

Finally Jews in Britain & the Irish in America seem much more culturally quiescient than their trans-Atlantic counterparts. That may be because of the preponderance of White identity in the US (which Irish Americans are comfortable with) and English-British in the UK (which British Jews but not the Irish partake in; a historical insult has been “West British”).

Der Seiler” would indeed translate to “ropemaker”

The English surname is Roper, though English mountaineers do sometimes use the technique known as abseiling that involves the use of a rope.

I seem to share my surname with 350 federal employees. I’m not going to calculate an average, but I did note that one guy makes a whopping $330,000 per year. Curiously, he lives in the same city that I do, although I am not related to him and I do not know him.

Isn’t that ‘Smythe’ rather than ‘Smythes’?

No. Steve was using the plural: “Smythes…really are”…

In Britain, Smythes (a snobbish variant of Smith) really are more high achieving than Smiths.

Yeah: Hispano-Americans are completely out of control in that regard. Just check out the names among random Major League players and compare them to real Spanish Christian names. I can think of no Saint Yasiel, Yadier, Asdrubal, Kendrys or even–if we’re gonna get all technical about it–Jhonny.

I don’t have the exact numbers, but my well-educated guess is American Jews are north of 95% Ashkenazi, with the remainder mostly nouveau riche, gold-chain-wearing recent Persian and Israeli immigrants.

A small handful descend from the Sephardic Jews who settled here in the Colonial Period:

The Grandees: The Story of America’s Sephardic Elite
by Stephen Birmingham

The Wertheimers in Israel are from Kippenheim in South West Germany – according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stef_Wertheimer

The ones in France don’t seem to be related, although they come from near the same region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Wertheimer
—

I don’t know of Oppenheimers in Israel.

But you can see them in the UK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hodge

South Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicky_Oppenheimer

Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheim_family

US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer

. It has always baffled me that there is a chain of shoe stores called The Athletes Foot, apparently oblivious of the fact, or perhaps because of the fact that athlete’s foot is a fungal infection that grows between the toes.

I always assumed that they were being playful……

She keeps talking about “myths”…

The subject has been immortalized in the hilarious Charisma Man comics.

http://www.charismaman.com

OT: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-07/wikileaks-publishes-michael-wolffs-entire-sold-out-trump-book-pdf

I’m with Nikki Haley who told little Georgie S that she hadn’t and wouldn’t read it.

Great to see that DJT has told both the UN and Pakistan to go pound sand.

But they were tiny in number compared to the later Ashkenazi immigration, and (AFAIK) no longer exist as a distinct group due to intermarriage with the Ashkenazi and gentile populations.

I don’t know of Oppenheimers in Israel.

You definitely know one. Peace Now!

“Wales for example something like 30 surnames account for 90% of the population.”

I read once in the Welsh Guards regiments of the Royal Army mail call or musters get interesting. So many Joneses for example it’s often “Private Jones Number 2, or Private Jones Number 9” etc

Cohen is among the more common Ashkenazi surnames, but it’s not particularly high-achieving by Jewish standards.

I wonder if the Coen Brothers are descendants of some guy who changed the spelling of his name for social climbing reasons, the way my surname descends from some guy named Seiler (ropemaker) who became mayor of a small town in Switzerland and changed the spelling of his name to Sailer for snobbish purposes.

Maybe, but there’s an awful lot of “Cohen” variants to explain. Kohen, Kahane, Kagan, Cohn, Cohan, Cohane, Cohne, Cone, Kahn, Kaganovich, etc. It’s basically “King” for Jews. Descendants of the priestly caste.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4454-cohen

https://www.geni.com/projects/The-Cohen-Project/808

Cohen, *Cohn, *Cowan, *Kagan, *Kaganov, *Kaganovich, *Kahane, *Kahn, *Kaplan, *Kogan, *Kohen, *Kohn, *Rapaport, *Rappaport, Kohnowski, Kogen, Kohan, Katz, Kahane, Kahin, Coffen, Cogan, Cahana, Koon, Conn, Cone, Cohnheim, Cohnfeld, Cahn, Cahen.
See Cohen Surnames on Geni

https://www.geni.com/surnames/Cohen

“.. people with French Norman surnames remain over-represented in the better jobs in Britain today. Some of that is likely due to name-changing, and I’m not sure how true that is in the U.S.”

The New Jews (ex-russian empire, late 19th century) are insatiable surname stealers (the post -Cromwell crowd are pretty OK people, I find). But only of the minor aristocracy and provincial gentry. Therefore northern-English, Welsh and Scottish “Norman” names are ludicrously overrepresented among Thatcher’s “old Estonians, not old Etonians”.

For some no doubt Dunning/Kruger reason, they think that )))we((( can’t tell, or that others can’t.
Like no man ever looked like his father, ever, in this island.
(Bad news, Jews. I can even tell a Catholic at 30 yards, never mind a Welshman. Anyone who clumsily attempts to conceal their Kindred, Name and indeed House in this manner will be tret according. We’ve been doing this since … forever. Think on …)

I note with interest that neither common Saxon names nor (insanely hazardous, feud-risking) Gaelic names are ever suborned in this manner. Says a lot about (((their))) intentions over “integration” with the aborigines.

As I’ve repeatedly been arguing, Asian Americans are actually the most openly discriminated against group in American society today.

A great reason to end immigration of Asians. Spare them the oppression, and ourselves the whining.

… so if it isn’t a particularly prestigious surname it would seem to contradict both the thesis of this post and HBD explanations for Ashkenazi achievement.

Not at all. Literacy–that in the initial screen/cull to startup Ashkenazi, literacy at the recite the Torah level would be a selection factor giving you a good IQ at launch–has been proposed by lots of people including me. (JackD suggested even this might not be the case–you didn’t really have to be literate to do the necessary ritual recitation.)

However, grinding through the centuries what’s really going to be selective is economic performance. Do you want to marry your really hot/healthy/fertile daughter to the rabbi’s boy, or the son of the successfully banker or grain trader? All else even close to equal, my daughter’s going with B.

It’s actually the economic benefit of IQ that will drive selection–better survival of children, and ergo better mates to have children with.

The Jewish community can through monetary support and bestowing social status drive up the relative standing of the rabbi and appeal of the young rabbis as marriage partners. But it’s hard for it to be at the very top in a community that is doing so well in intellectually demanding professions. And then the real breakout of the Jewish community in the last couple hundred years was when they realized the goyim had actually shot by them in intellectual development while they were treading water in their little closed backwater. The folks/families leading the charge to engage with European intellectual developments, were not the rabbinate.

I’d never met a white person with the last name of Washington or Jefferson, but I’ve seen plenty of blacks with those surnames

Back when he was funny, Bill Simmons compiled a list he called the Reggie Cleveland All-Stars. This was a list of white athletes whose names made them sound black.

“Asdrubal” isn’t too odd.
Hannibal (of the elephant-over-the-alps fame) had a brother and second in command known in English as Hasdrubal. Spanish has a odd relationship with the “h” sound, so Asdrubal is a solid rendering.
In Spain proper, Hannibal and his reign have a “home town” feel. Hannibal colonized much of what we know as the modern Spanish cities etc. he is as good a place as any to start as a Founding Father for a cohesive, collective Spain rather than stand-alone city states. As an example, Hannibal’s clan name is Barca, from which we get Barcelona.
Hannibal/Hasdrubal have cachet in Spanish that, while not mirrored in English or French, *is* a longstanding, organic element of culture. Asdrubal =/= Deshawndreisha

Can’t see much wrong with Asdrubal…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasdrubal_Barca

Anibal is quite a popular name (famous Argentine tango star was Anibal Troilo) also.

“Now start with a uniform population of Roman Catholics. Smartest boy in the family becomes a priest or a monk: then nothing. His siblings are nothing special (remember we started from a uniform population)…”

Your premise is wrong. In mediaeval times, it was not the smartest boy in the family that became a priest – it was a younger son who would not inherit the family’s estates. He was, in other words, a spare rather than an heir. Priests were drawn from the “better” classes – as a rule they had to be legitimate, and free-born (so, not of the villein caste). In some places all four grandparents had to be armigerous.

Younger sons had career options in the church, the military, and after a point, in the law. One might become a clergyman because he was a poor physical specimen and not fit to be a soldier; such was the case with Talleyrand, who was lamed in an accident at the age of four, and made a churchman (becoming bishop of Autun in 1789, just as revolution was about to break out).

If an heir died leaving a priest next in line to titles and estates, it was not uncommon that he might be dispensed of his vows so that he might succeed to them. An example of this was Cesare Borgia, made archbishop of Valencia in 1492 and a cardinal in 1493. When his brother Giovanni died in 1497 (some say with “assistance” from his younger brother), Cesare sought release from his vows and renounced his cardinalate in 1498, to become Duke of Valentinois, gonfalonier and captain-general of the Holy Roman Church.

Monks and nuns present a different picture. Monasteries and convents supplied the mediaeval equivalent of social welfare services, finding accommodation and work for those who could get it nowhere else. Most such persons were not priests or even under religious vows, but worked on the estates belonging to religious institutions. However, some were admitted as serving brothers or sisters. Nunneries also functioned as homes for unmarriageable women – typically unmarriageable because their fathers could not afford dowries. Often they were sent to nunneries against their wishes, as in the lyrics of a well-known song of the period:

Une jeune fillette
de noble coeur,
Plaisante et joliette
de grand’ valeur,
Outre son gré on l’a rendu nonnette
Cela point ne luy haicte
dont vit en grand’ douleur…

One of Robert Oppenheimer’s children went to Hyde Park HS in Chicago in the 1960s.

Variants of Cohen

Now and Forever — A Conversation with Israel Zangwill (New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1925)
Zangwill–That is strange, for in every European country Jews are foremost among the leaders in all the arts.
Roth–It is not strange at all. Jewish literary talent in America has been exhausted in the effort to disguise the name Cohen of which you may find in the New York Telephone Directory no less than twenty-four variations: Cohen, Cohn, Cone, Cunn, Curie, Coan, Coon, Cohene, Cane, Kohn, Kohne, Kohen, Kohene, Kuhn, Kuhne, Kun, Kunn, Koen, Konn, Coone, Cahn, Kone, Kann, and Kahn

If it’s a reasonably common name, just throw in a white first name (Brian, Clive, Nigel, Alan) to ethnic-cleanse the sample

Say what you will about Donald John Trump, he’s a billionaire, and he only had a few million handed to him. He’s done alright for a shaygets in a very Jewish millieu. He has drive and ambition and balls. Neither Obama nor GWB can say that.

Not at all. Literacy–that in the initial screen/cull to startup Ashkenazi, literacy at the recite the Torah level would be a selection factor giving you a good IQ at launch–has been proposed by lots of people including me. (JackD suggested even this might not be the case–you didn’t really have to be literate to do the necessary ritual recitation.)

Literacy is a very low bar; people with Down’s Syndrome can learn how to read. I doubt that that had much of a eugenic effect.

Aren’t names like Kohn, Cohn, Kahn, and Caan just other versions of Cohen?

As I’ve repeatedly been arguing, Asian Americans are actually the most openly discriminated against group in American society today.

A great reason to end immigration of Asians. Spare them the oppression, and ourselves the whining.

Here’s my rule for immigration: Don’t allow in anyone who can make a claim for discrimination based on ethnic/racial/religious grounds.

Gazillion years ago I was interviewed at a small liberal arts college by a black man named Leslie Cohen. “Just like the Jews,” he said.

I’ve never seen a lot of these Cohen variations, yet one of the most well-known ones due to a pair of film-making brothers isn’t even on the list.

I can think of no Saint Yasiel, Yadier, Asdrubal, Kendrys or even–if we’re gonna get all technical about it–Jhonny.

Jhonny is a shorted form of the Spanish name Jhonattan, as for example in the professional golfer Jhonattan Vegas. It is a somewhat phonetic (in Spanish) rendition of the Jewish name Yonatan which comes from the Old Testament. Jonathan was the best friend (?lover) of King David, an important Bronze Age chieftain in Jewish history.

So not a saint’s name.

Yasiel is a Spanish version of the biblical Jasiel = whom God made, and also one of King David’s cohorts.

So not a saint’s name.

Asdrubal would be a Spanish version of the name of the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal Barca who was the son of Hamilcar and brother of Hannibal. There is some suggestion that the city of Barcelona is named after this family, but scholars consider this to be a folk derivation.

So not a Christian saint’s name either.

Yadier is a popular Hispanic name with Jewish origins, compare to Yadira.

Some of the Cohens may actually be Cohans,

I read once in the Welsh Guards regiments of the Royal Army mail call or musters get interesting. So many Joneses for example it’s often “Private Jones Number 2, or Private Jones Number 9” etc

From Zulu:

Pvt. William Jones: What’s he up to, 593?

Pte. Robert Jones: Oh, I think he wants to be hero, 716.

Cpl. Frederic Schiess, NNC: Haven’t you rednecks got names instead of numbers?

Pte. Robert Jones: ‘Tis a Welsh regiment, man! Though there are some foreigners from England in it , mind. I am Jones from Bwlchgwyn, he is Jones from Builth Wells, and there are four more Joneses in C Company! Confusing, isn’t it, Dutchy?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058777/quotes

Nicknames (eke or eik names to which the n of the indefinite article became attached) are necessary in many places.
Jimmy Sue (for his wife) to distinguish from ten other Jimmy Gardiners
Black Angus (hair or temper) for the same reason.

Or one guy called Eddie Gallagher (a “blow-in”) who was referred to by all as Eddie Barrett (wife’s surname).

How many Patels honestly report all their income?

I stayed at a Patel owned hotel recently where I got to talking with the swarthy owner about his hi-fi setup at home. This guy had purchased, new and at only a modest discount from retail, a setup consisting of “Stereophile Class A Recommended Components ” costing more than the house he was living in. We talked about the technical issues for a minute and I brought up the cost issue, to which he responded that he bought stereo equipment with his cash income, and the house with railroad income (his facility did a lot of his business housing railcrews who go out to another location and back as soon as they have completed their rest period). He liked stereo equipment and watches because they are in the house and away from IRS eyes, and unlike cars aren’t licensed and titled.

He had no idea what I did and wasn’t concerned that he was essentially sharing the fact he was skimming large amounts of cash off his business with someone who for all he knew might have been IRS, FBI or whatever.

And really why shouldn’t he do that? Does he have any real investment in the American nation? Hell no.

The original name of the clan Campbell was O’Duibhne…

The most likely explanation is that Asians have been running the last name system for the longest time. Probability favors the growth of the common names at the expense of the rare ones so these systems tend to end up with a few overwhelmingly common names.

If a man has only daughters (or no children) his name doesn’t get passed to the next generation. Rare names are at a constant threat of disappearing. When a name dies because a man only had female offspring, the odds are it gets replaced by a common name, in fact the most likely replacement is the most common name in the culture. The more common a name is, the more likely it is that it is the name that takes over when another dies. Eventually any such last name system “degenerates” into a couple of common names that eat all the others.

My last name has a few dozen people and it’s in two unrelated families. We didn’t use inherited last names in my home region until the Russians took over 200 years ago and my home region is full of unique last names that exist only there. (Mine is the name of the estate that my great-great-great-grandfather acquired; it was standard for landowners to pick the names of their property.) In some other parts of Finland where inherited last names have been used for much longer there is much more domination by a couple of common names.

Humphrey Lyttelton, not Littleton.

I only know because I read the once-famous collection of letters between his father and Rupert Hart-Davies, back in the day.

They were not jazz fans – more inclined to Tennyson and Shakespeare.

> Sailer is one of the more elite golfcourse surnames

fixed it for you.

Source: http://www.golfcourseindustry.com (“the voice for today’s superintendent!”)

Thanks, I see now.

Asians–world champion cultural appropriators.

Old Yan has even carefully observed our traditions of racial grievance and whining and learned to do it over trivial to non-existence stuff like a Jewish guy.

Seriously old boy, if your kid can’t get into Harvard with his test prepped SAT scores and all that violin playing … bitch to the Jews in charge, not the rest of us.

It mainly looks like just different ways to transliterate the letters in the original Hebrew word (with vowels, without vowels, with different interpretations of the vowels, etc).

The funny one there is Katz, which was formed from the initials of ‘Holy Priest’ (although written the other way round).

Others are what happens when you translate the word into another language or add a suffix.

—

There’s a reverse situation for Russian women’s surnames in Hebrew – where they usually lose their suffixes in Israel, to make it easier for Israelis that don’t understand the naming conventions. (And result sounds very eccentric to Russian ears).

“Though, anecdotally, ive never met a white Washington, or Jefferson, for that matter.”

Stan Laurel’s real name was Arthur Stanley Jefferson.

As a kid I was fascinated by the surname M’Sadoques. I knew a few people by that name. Something about the M-apostrophe just seemed weird.

The name is French and is pronounced something like Massa-dokes.

Ran an experiment to see if there is any Brahmin privilege; seems to be none, though they are most numerous. In fact Vyshya (Businessmen) have privilege.

Sharma: 133K (count 171), US + 50K
Varma/Verma: 133K (65), US + 50K
Gupta: 212K (129), US + 129K
Das*: 130K (77), US + 47K

Let’s also not forget our uh good friend Ben Shapiro, aka The Hebrew Hammer.

Let’s also not forget our uh good friend Ben Shapiro, aka The Hebrew Hammerhead Shark. TFIFY.

I sort of knew Erskine Bowles (was poised to be a Big Deal at one time) from a country club.

always thought that was an odd name but more fool I

Rabbinic and wealthy families were largely the same families for hundreds of years up until emancipation. As it happens, before emancipation and the advent of the “pulpit Rabbi”, the rabbinate was a much more demanding intellectual endeavor which required the mastery of a vast corpus of law and text.

As I’ve repeatedly been arguing, Asian Americans are actually the most openly discriminated against group in American society today.

Right, because Asian American life expectancy is going down, and Asian Americans are the object of the white privilege Maoist struggle sessions, and Asian American don’t make as much money as white Americans.

Come on, you are a member of a privileged overclass. Your repeated arguing is nothing more than argument bereft of facts, and devoid of reasoning.

Percy? Their less-well-provided-for (ox-bothering pedestrian scum) kin claim the names of, among others I believe, Reed (of Redesdale and Otterburn, opposed in perpetuity to the names of Elliot (double L, double T, whatever), and Armstrong (of the Moon), never mind Halls (not particularly dangerous, unlike the aforementioned two). And possibly Charlton (greatest living Englishman).

I remain to be corrected, basically because the northern barbarians are of little consequence, and much of a muchness.

Try Gascoigne or, I dunno, Musgrave, Dacre or Clifford, they’re of a similar vintage and locality, and the descents should map out similarly (relentless gentry interbreeding). Interesting experiment. Do brits fuck about carelessly with their surnames like foreigners do? Inalienable surnames only became a thing apres les Normands, mainly for tax reasons. Only yDNA will provide the answers, I suspect.

And, of course, an illegitimate son of the house gave us the Smithsonian.

That bastard!

Fact or fiction, his narrative style is damn riveting. Beware, very unputdownable. I want to read Rupert Murdoch book now.

Also, besides that John Boehner episode, nobody has said one word in rebuttal.

“Soup takers” is worse.

Lanterns on the Levee

with him at Sewanee

That was an elite worth the appelation, though I don’t suppose they were much tested…

Umm, way to bury the lede. Jennifer Jason Leigh played Stacey Hamilton.

The theatre or music hall (the Britannia Panopticon) in Glasgow’s Trongate, where Laurel made his stage debut, still exists and a band of enthusiasts are gradually reinstating it.

Jefferson Sr owned a couple of music halls in the city during Stan’s childhood.

https://www.britanniapanopticon.org

That would be where their house was. In relation to the administrative center (drunk cleric in a hut).

Up on an escarpment, where they’d cleared out a plot (being remarkably wet and temperate, England was always infested with constantly-encroaching trees, until some bugger invented the iron/steel furnace, and sheep). Also they’d be Saxons, or “Danes” (i.e. weekings), or their ignoble descendants. Not Welsh, Scots, Irish or Flemings.
Backbone of England, and don’t you forget it.

Yep I’m mildly privileged, only to be expected for a Scottish name, wow your Veterans Affairs people are well paid!

Stringers, Fletchers, Bowman (-men). There’s a quiverfull of those names, and would take some digging, due to dialect changes and the forgetting of trades like the geezers who supplied the (horn) nocks and tips, or the bluebell-root glue for the flights, or the quiver-makers themselves (poss. a side-guild of sadlers, or scabbard-makers).
Just be assured that it was a major trade, on a level with masons or carters. And if it weren’t for them, c’est certain que je vous addresserez-ez-ez en francais (or whatever their monkey-gibber is, correctly).

In The Quiet Man movie Barry Fitzgerald refers to Cohan and specifically says it’s not Cohen!

Just to take the median, since it’s easier:

WASPy names

Eliot $137,000 (n=1)
Winthrop $131,000 (n=3)
Chafee $109,000 (n=1)
Berkeley $98,000 (n=9)
Dana $88,000 (n=38)
Putnam $88,000 (n=77)
Peabody $83,000 (n=22)
Thayer $83,000 (n=44)
Lowell $82,000 (n=23)
Cushing $82,000 (n=29)
Delano $81,000 (n=13)
Forbes $78,000 (n=163)
Morse $78,000 (n=170)
Choate $74,000 (n=34)
Endicott $65,000 (n=14)
Coolidge $46,000 (n=11)

German names

Snyder $80,000 (n=625)
Huffman $77,000 (n=156)

Irish names

Flanagan $93,000 (n=123)
Sweeney $84,000 (n=231)
Callahan $84,000 (n=203)
Doyle $81,000 (n=283)
McGuire $80,000 (n=237)

Black names

Cooks $78,000 (n=75)
Shabazz $77,000 (n=23)
Broadnax $77,000 (n=27)
Boykins $72,000 (n=25)
Gadsden $71,000 (n=17)
Ivery $69,000 (n=14)
Smalls $66,000 (n=73)
Pettaway $65,000 (n=12)
Gadson $65,000 (n=29)
Wigfall $63,000 (n=15)
Fluellen $55,000 (n=12)

I wonder about the restriction of range / selection bias.

Of Irish surnames, my intuition had been that the Daly name punches over its weight. I also felt the same way about Higgins.

Backed up on Daly by the OPM data: 143 Daly feds average 98,788 or +$16,000.

Not so much on the Higgins, a more common Irish name. 314 federal Higgins average $85,526 for a modest factor or +$3000.

Compare to a less common Irish name, that was once Irish-American royalty: Meagher (Thomas Meagher). 21 federal Meaghers averaging $82,532, which is a basically the fed average (factor of 0).

Between my own name and the regular, non-contractured Johnson: Son of John may be more common than Smith.

Son-of-John is of course, what the women claim, they could well be son-of-robert.

OT–a titbit that might be of marginal interest, (think Matthew Yglesias, polar bear hunting) Conan on living in not-yet-hip Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

0:26 – I was shot several times when I lived there […] I took’em in the shoulder

She is kind of forgotten now since the Kardashians came along (which somehow is about a decade ago by now – they have managed to maintain fame for a long time).

There is also another interesting site that people might be interested in. The U.S. Census Bureau has an Excel spreadsheet that anyone can download showing all surnames that occurred at least 100 times in the 2010 Census, along with the racial distribution of those names:

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/2010_surnames.html

Out of curiosity, I checked some of the surnames that have come up on this thread, to see how many people held those names, along with their racial breakdown (I am showing the percentages that are black or white since these constitute most of the people showing these names, but other backgrounds are shown as well):

Cohen – 89,091 people, 88.89% white, 5.97% black
Huntington – 7,306 people, 88.17% white, 4.24% black
Jackson – 708,099 people, 39.89% white, 53.04% black
Jefferson – 55,179 people, 17.45% white, 74.24% black
Percy – 4,226 people, 67.49% white, 21.77% black
Sailer – 2,520 people, 93.61% white, 0.79% black
Shapiro – 24,335 people, 96.05% white, 0.35% black
Smith – 2,442,977 people, 70.9% white, 23.11% black (the most common surname)
Washington – 177,386 people, 5.17% white, 87.53% black

Some variations of these names are also interesting. For example, there were 159 McWashingtons in the 2010 Census (4.4% white, 86.16% black). There were also 571 people reporting the last name Cohens (with an ‘s’) (5.08% white, 86.34% black).