- 17 Mar 2012 20:53
#13919303
Language influences the way we think and how we behave. Under the title „The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets“, the Yale researcher Keith Chen has published a study in which he found that people whose native language requires speakers to make a clear distinction between present and future actions tend to have more debt, save less for retirement, are more overweight and less healthy than people whose native language is more flexible in this respect. Natives of the first group also place more emphasis on short term earnings than on long-term earnings.
Some of the languages which require a clear distinction between future and present are Greek, Italian, Portuguese, English, Italian, French, Irish and Spanish. Among the languages where this distinction is more fluid are German, Japanese, most Scandinavian languages, Chinese and Korean.
For example, the English sentence “the sun will shine tomorrow” generally requires the future tense, while in German the same sentence can be both in the present or in the future (“Morgen scheint die Sonne” (present), “Morgen wird die Sonne scheinen” (future))
The theory is that people who habitually make that distinction due to their language pattern will tend to treat the future as more remote and therefore spend more today, worry less about future health effect of for example, smoking, overeating or lack of exercise and save less for retirement.
Read the full article:
http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d18a/d1820.pdf
On a more positive note, I hear from informed sources that the Goethe Institute in Athens is currently overrun by students wanting to learn German ;-)
Some of the languages which require a clear distinction between future and present are Greek, Italian, Portuguese, English, Italian, French, Irish and Spanish. Among the languages where this distinction is more fluid are German, Japanese, most Scandinavian languages, Chinese and Korean.
For example, the English sentence “the sun will shine tomorrow” generally requires the future tense, while in German the same sentence can be both in the present or in the future (“Morgen scheint die Sonne” (present), “Morgen wird die Sonne scheinen” (future))
The theory is that people who habitually make that distinction due to their language pattern will tend to treat the future as more remote and therefore spend more today, worry less about future health effect of for example, smoking, overeating or lack of exercise and save less for retirement.
Languages differ dramatically in how much they require their speakers to mark the timing of events
when speaking. In this paper I test the hypothesis that being required to speak differently about future
events (what linguists call strongly grammaticalized future-time reference) leads speakers to treat the
future as more distant, and to take fewer future-oriented actions. Consistent with this hypothesis I
find that in every major region of the world, speakers of strong-FTR languages save less per year, hold
less retirement wealth, smoke more, are more likely to be obese, and suffer from worse long-run health.
Read the full article:
http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d18a/d1820.pdf
On a more positive note, I hear from informed sources that the Goethe Institute in Athens is currently overrun by students wanting to learn German ;-)