This claims not to be an April Fool's prank, but it has to be a little bit tongue in cheek. To earnestly make predictions based on assumptions about the world more than 500 years in the future implies at least a wink when coming from a serious scholar.
It reminds me of a claim I heard as a kid that I still think about today. This was a few years after Elvis died. It went something like "before his death in 1977, there were less than 100 Elvis impersonators in the world. By 1980, there were more than 10,000. If this trend continues, the entire biomass of the Earth will be composed of Elvis impersonators by the year 2000". This was obviously a joke, and is not even pointing out a fallacy relevant to the subject of the article, but I thought it was cute.
I did my part! I was working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the time and wrote a script to update 10 million rows in their occupation database from "Elvis impersonator" to "software developer" (I think that's what started the dot-com boom)
Another article mentions: "The project is a part of a campaign, designed to coincide with April Fools’ Day, to raise awareness of the implications of not amending the law requiring married couples to share the same surname."
There are big gaps in the preview for that chapter, but I found this marvelous quote, which I think describes some big elements of Hacker News perfectly (emphasis mine):
> However, endless population expansion has not been possible for animal species in the mast, and only the kind of wild-eyed enthusiast who frequents science fiction conferences and a certain kind of economics department believe it will be possible for the human race to expand endlessly.
The impression I got from the article is that it's a gimmick to bring attention to the law that forces married couples to adopt the same surname and get that changed.
There is a cultural difference that make the situation in Vietnam not so bad as it sounds. In Korea, as in Japan, the cultural norm is to refer to people by their family name. In Vietnamese culture, the given name is normally used.
As a native Korean, I'm sure that both A and B will notice the confusion and switch to full names at around the fifth or sixth line. Korean full names tend to be short so it isn't cumbersome, in fact full names are often used in the first place exactly for that reason.
The real problem by the way starts with multiple persons with the same or almost identically sounding names. My own name (Kang Seonghoon) for example is shared with at least 100s of other Korean people, including one famous singer who got arrested later ;-)
Good point about use of full names. Since you are a native, you might not have noticed this, but I find that as a foreigner operating in professional settings, I only hear people referred to in English as $title+$family_name. Aside from my office mate, I can't think of the given name of anyone on campus.
Speaking of having identical names, the one that cracks me up is 김정은.
Wasn’t this caused because when the country adopted surnames, people were allowed to choose their name, and most people chose the name of the current ruling family?
The explanation I saw was tax farming. You don't have a surname, so for the Emperor's purposes, you're getting the surname of the guy who collects your taxes for me
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has
shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the
Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million
three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years
from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long.
... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such
wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact.
-- Mark Twain
> including the assumption that Japan never amends their law that mandates married couples share the same surname. In fact, Japan is the only country with a law forcing couples to adopt the same surname after marriage.
Not familiar with Japan, Japanese or Japanese culture, is this true? If it's true, what is the arguments for having such a law?
I'd believe it just because it's not the only oddity about family records and naming in Japan.
In Japan, the public, legal family records track children by gender-specific birth order, e.g. "First son, first daughter, second son".
If your first 'son' later needs to change gender this is a bad relational database problem! You can't have two first daughters since they aren't twins. The trans daughter can't be added as a second daughter, because then the age order would be wrong and there would be no first son. You'd have to either wipe out the ordering or bump up the second son to first son, and first daughter down to second, making them useless as primary keys. I don't remember how Japan typically solves this.
It's funny because in America, to my knowledge we don't even track that, it doesn't matter. It's just a Japanese tradition that only worked while everyone was presumed to be cis.
For us in America, only the parent-child relationship is tracked, by birth certificates, and luckily most people live in states where those can be amended. (I don't like changing a historical record, but otherwise I'd have to haul around name change receipts to anyone who wonders why my legal gender and name on some documents doesn't match other documents, and it's just a PITA)
That just sounds like yet another reason not to organize society around 'gender identity' in lieu of sex. It leads to so many nonsensical and illogical outcomes, just to uphold this ideologically-driven legal fiction.
First child, second child, etc. who cares about the sex or gender!?
This problem appears in other related areas too. Many people think that the right way to fix racisim is to make everyone obsessed about their racial identity.
I get it; it all started because it's right to feel people proud and not ashamed of what they are, but I think going too far in that direction is backfiring greatly
This is an artifact of how the Japanese system works. In a nutshell, they track households (families) with individuals as sub records of the family record.
Everybody on the family register record shares the same surname. Non-citizens are listed as distrinct references (for foreign spouses and the like) and they may have a different surname from the household record.
There is more to it than this but that is the key thing to know about the system.
I'm also told that Polish law has some strict limitations on baby names.
My understanding of both is that they want to preserve their culture. Feels like a weird kneejerk to me, raised in a culture where it's normal to just invent new spellings for old names.
> Polish law has some strict limitations on baby names
It's not that strict. It's basically ensuring that if you want to give your child a name it will need to be actual human name (recognizable as a name in Poland) not something offensive or random. It's basically a law to prevent parents from harming their children by naming them something retarded they found fashionable at the time.
It's enough that you burdened your child with life. Further harming it with a weird "name", the Polish law considers a bit much.
France used to have a list you would have to choose from, until 1993. Lots of other laws in different countries, but Poland not mentioned on Wikipedia’s page:
> Feels like a weird kneejerk to me, raised in a culture where it's normal to just invent new spellings for old names.
Let me guess, you're an American (or Canadian, etc.)?
One annoying tic that Americans frequently have, when encountering a cultural difference (outside a few specific superficial areas like food), is they take the position that the American way is the right way and any other ways are less than. They frequently do this while simultaneously professing how tolerant and accepting they are of other cultures.
Basically, I feel Americans really want cultural difference eliminated in favor of a bland, AirSpace [1] liberalism, except for some funny hats and exotic Instagrammable cuisine.
Curious what efficiency improvements are enabled by standardizing on married surnames. Maybe nurses at hospitals never need to request to see your marriage license if you have the same surname? And besides that...?
This is coming from a somewhat anecdotal place. But as a married person in the US whose partner didn't change names, it's not been an issue at any point in the last 10 years of marriage. Not once have I had to explain to someone "oh yeah, we're legally married." If anything, in our case so far it would have been inefficient for us to go through the time filing paperwork to get one of our names changed to the other's. Which, is exactly why we never bothered in the first place. What a waste of time (in our eyes.)
It's relevant in the sense that it reduces the diversity in names. If the parents could both keep their surnames, they'd have two alternatives left for their children instead of one. I bet that more often than currently, people would choose the rarer name for their children.
But the thing is, it doesn't happen. As it is said in the article, in 95% of cases, men don't want to change their name, and woman yield, regardless of the rarity/commonness of the name.
Why would they choose the rarer name? People always like popular names, so it seems at best it wouldn’t help and at worst it would risk faster erasure. If Japan wants a legal solution to this, how about requiring the less popular surname to be kept by the new couple, based on official statistics?
There's popular, and then there's double digit % popular.
I have a very popular first name, but it's still way less than 1% of population for my gender and it's already "too common" at my workplace such that we have to use surnames instead
To avoid confusion. We had three Nakamura's at office one time, so we defaulted to first names. We currently have two Nomura's and we use nicknames for them.
I've also met people who – against the normal, mainstream Japanese way – basically always prefer their first names, because their last name is so common people are going to mix them up with... someone. I sometimes sense a kind of an aura from these people: they don't want to be seen as just "one of the Satо̄s or Tanakas". (Btw. those are the exact names of the people that came to mind, whom I felt that aura of not wanting to use their last name.)
I think that those kind of people would choose the rarer name for their kids. But they don't also want to change theirs, because they are in the middle of a professional carrier, and being the busy people they are, they don't want to stir things up.
Having a popular name is not that great. When I was in high school, me and three of my classmates share the same name. We had to comes up with some nicknames to refer to each other.
I have the most popular name in my generation for my language, so I understand, but people still choose them. The desire to choose a pleasing sound that others will also like is strong and cross-cultural, and applies to surnames as well when a choice is possible.
Everyone has a surname, and as long as there is more than one surname, each surname has a non zero chance of going extinct. Therefore, in the long run, we'll all share the same surname.
That's not the only problem with my logic though ;) It's in fact the smaller one, since the rare blank surname are likely to go extinct given enough time.
The graph he shows assumes a strict exponential growth. It's rather hilarious to see a projection that assumes a phenomenon will be at its fastest rate of change when it hits the strict limit (100% of the population). If he would project with a sigmoid growth curve he would get a different answer (much more plausible), but it would be less fun (definitely later than 2531).
This happens more often around the world than one would think.
My surname can be traced back to a single city where it most likely originated and over generations an additional, informal (so not present in any official document) adjectives were added to determine who was related.
Could this problem be solved by using the old Scandinavian family name etymology (i.e., patronymic/matronymic surnames rather than heritable family names)?
It reminds me of a claim I heard as a kid that I still think about today. This was a few years after Elvis died. It went something like "before his death in 1977, there were less than 100 Elvis impersonators in the world. By 1980, there were more than 10,000. If this trend continues, the entire biomass of the Earth will be composed of Elvis impersonators by the year 2000". This was obviously a joke, and is not even pointing out a fallacy relevant to the subject of the article, but I thought it was cute.