LifeOnNightmareMode t1_iw28soq wrote on November 12, 2022 at 11:37 AM

Reply to comment by WaerI in The effect of the First World War on names, in France [OC] by bjco

Because casualtity rates were at more less constant level throughout those month. So if we assume that only those where the father was killed would be name after them then the rate of naming could stay somewhat constant too.

WaerI t1_iw44quk wrote on November 12, 2022 at 8:35 PM

I would disagree since there are two things that need to happen based on that assumption. The father has to die, and then the baby must be born. If the fathers deaths follow a perfect step function (i.e they are constant once war is declared) the rate of naming will increase as the proportion of dead fathers increases. Based on that assumption what this data implies is almost all of the fathers died simultaneously. Basically the rate of naming is the integral of the rate of deaths

LifeOnNightmareMode t1_iwhuplj wrote on November 15, 2022 at 7:21 PM

I don’t think so as each dot is the rate at that day.

WaerI t1_iwigk0s wrote on November 15, 2022 at 9:41 PM

I'm not sure what you mean I understand that each dot is the rate at that day. My point is that if all the fathers died at once we would expect the naming chang to instantly rise and stay high as it is here for roughly 9 months. This is because the child isn't named when the father dies they are named when they are born some time in the next 9 months.

LifeOnNightmareMode t1_iwilt4a wrote on November 15, 2022 at 10:16 PM

I was thinking along the lines that if the number of future fathers dying remains constant than the naming should remain constant too. Only if the number of death per day increases then the naming would increase too. But it’s just speculating as I don’t know what really happened :)

WaerI t1_iwirjzq wrote on November 15, 2022 at 10:56 PM

I understand that, but what I'm saying is that if the number of fathers dying remains constant than the naming will gradually increase for 9 months at which point it will remain constant. If there's 100000 fathers and 1000 died a week and there is also 1000 births we would only expect 1% or 10 of those babies to have dead fathers. This means that the number of babies with dead fathers is proportional to the proportion of fathers who are dead. The next week if both numbers remained constant we would expect the number to be 2% and so on. Conversely even if fathers stopped dying there would still be a large number of births with dead fathers for several months.