A Baby Name Question of the Day

How much would you pay to ensure your baby got a “successful” name?

Look, we all know that wealth opportunities and job opportunities are shrinking, that much of the employment growth in the past decade came from (potentially misclassified) independent contractor gigs, and that every generation is going to need to be better than the one before it—better educated, better connected, and so on—to earn roughly the same amount.

As Bloomberg reports, there are plenty of companies theorizing that the next generation also needs to be better named—and they’re ready to charge new parents for the privilege.

You Can Now Pay Someone to Name Your Baby

Professional services have popped up in the U.S. and Europe to aid parents with naming their children for a fee. Last year, Marc Hauser, who runs the Switzerland-based naming agency Erfolgswelle, went from solely serving brands to also branding children. His firm charges over $29,000 for every baby it names, devoting two to three weeks and around 100 hours of work to the process.

It seems like if you have enough money to pay $29,000 for a baby name, you might also have a few of the other characteristics that correlate with a child’s future economic success: family income, parents who invest in their children’s development, and so on.

But sure, let a baby branding company tell you that you can’t name babies “Marc” anymore because “it’s connected to the name of an ancient Roman god of war.”

I totally get that, in the era of the Google search and the personal brand, parents might want to give their kids names that fit the brand they’d like them to have. Parents have always been doing that, to an extent; passing down values through the names they give their children.

And yes, the $29,000 baby branding service isn’t the only option. There are lower-cost baby naming consultants out there. Even budget ones!

So, the question of the day: how much would you pay to make sure your baby got an optimally successful name?

(The other question of the day: who’s going to do the study that compares the kids with $29,000 names to the kids with $300 names to the kids whose parents named them for free? When they start writing “30 under 30” lists in the year 2040, I want to know how much each of those successful young adults’ names cost.)

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