Living in Italy, I am constantly encountering people called Giuseppe, Giacomo, Andrea, Nicola, Filippo, Francesco, Franco, Marco, Alessandro, Lorenzo, Davide, and so on. There is something deeply traditional about Italy, for all its political Leftism and the usual embrace of smartphones and Facebook; it occurred to me that one could perhaps do a rough approximation of a society’s traditionalism by mapping out given name clusters: so, a non-traditional society like America will have a wider array of names, with lower frequency per item, whereas a highly traditional society like Pakistan will have a narrow cluster of names, each bearing a high volume.

So, in America there will be names like Todd, Ricko, Jamarcus, DeShawne, Tyrone, Chuckie, Tyler, Austin, Brandon, Kyle, Logan, Cody, Brad, Chase, and so on, but in Pakistan everyone will be called Mohammed.