Goodbye, Tricia

Apparently no one is named Tricia anymore.

According to this Wired post (h/t Andrew Sullivan) regarding the faddishness of baby names, Tricia fell out of popularity in the 1970s, never to return.

Tricia, unfortunately, is a casualty of our bubble culture. How so? Well, according to the Wired blog post, baby names suffer from the same rise and fall as other kinds of bubbles, and for many of the same reasons:

“We don’t think this is just a names thing,” said Jonah Berger, a University of Pennsylvania marketing professor, and author of the study, which appears Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We think this is a broader phenomenon that happens in all kinds of identity-relevant domains where people care about what something means not just what it does.”

Read those words again: Domains where people care about what something means not just what it does. Or, to translate this to the economic sphere, bubbles are likely in domains where people care about the expected future price more than what the asset actually does.

Bubbles are inherently unstable creatures. They are unsustainable. But are they more likely in a culture that is hyper-networked and where individuals are hyper-empowered with greater access to market information than ever before?

On one hand, I think that the SPAN Society is one that is more sustainable. Why? Because open networks don't have one central target to attack, contain more room for communication, are more diverse and have more popular support than command and control structures.

On the other hand, as I've discussed previously, they can be more vulnerable to infection, where a problem in one part of the network quickly passes through the whole network and spreads rapidly. If that's true, its possible that bubbles of all sorts start more easily in a SPAN Society, taking the S out of SPAN.

Feel free to weigh in with comments below.