Can language affect ability to save money (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Can language affect ability to save money
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pesahson
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20 February 2013 at 10:45am | IP Logged

Today TED published a new talk. The subject is Could your language affect your ability to save money? It is what is says on the tin really. I am dubious about Keith Chen's conclusions but nonetheless it is an interesting topic and something to think about.

TED Talk

Edit to add a description of the video:

What can economists learn from linguists? Behavioral economist Keith Chen introduces a fascinating pattern from his research: that languages without a concept for the future -- "It rain tomorrow," instead of "It will rain tomorrow" -- correlate strongly with high savings rates.

Edited by pesahson on 21 February 2013 at 8:50am
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Cavesa
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Message 2 of 5

20 February 2013 at 11:34am | IP Logged

Thanks for the link, I'm gonna watch it later today.

But first thing that came to m mind was the money spent on languages. Coursebooks, grammars, movies I
couldn't download in target language, books that I love in paper so much and so on. :-D
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Medulin
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Message 3 of 5

20 February 2013 at 10:19pm | IP Logged

Language learning costs a lot of money.
And people and employers prefer asking questions like: ''How long did you live in X'' (X=a country the language you learn is spoken in). (Which may be or (may not be) a good question, it's like asking a surgeon: ''How many surgeries have you performed so far?''; While the precise number is practically irrelevant, no one would consider him/her a surgeon if he/she hasn't performed any).

Edited by Medulin on 20 February 2013 at 10:24pm
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hrhenry
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Message 4 of 5

21 February 2013 at 12:06am | IP Logged

Before everybody gets off track about how much money they're spending on their learning
materials, watch the video.

It's got nothing to do with learning a language. It's about how we perceive the world
with the language(s) we already speak.

R.
==

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Chung
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Message 5 of 5

26 February 2013 at 8:53am | IP Logged

See this thread for much the same discussion.

I reiterate that I'm HIGHLY skeptical of this connection, and think that Chen is getting in over his head but is not averse to taking some liberties with his sources just to make a name for himself or get his conclusions and models to fit better.

In fact the linguist responsible for compiling the typological data that Chen exploits, Östen Dahl, had declined Chen's invitation to collaborate because of his skepticism of Chen's Whorfian-like hypothesis that motivates the paper.

Östen Dahl wrote:

February 13, 2012 @ 3:46 pm

I would like to note that I had a fairly extensive correspondence with Chen, who actually invited me to collaborate with him, which I declined. I did try quite hard to dissuade him from the idea, for reasons partly coinciding with what Geoff and Mark have written here. I also pointed out that his diagrams looked more or less equally nice with "rounded front vowels" replacing "weak FTR". The problem is that the countries in previously Protestant, nowadays secularized NW Europe, where both these phenomena are well represented, also contribute heavily to the countries where people are best at saving.

(Source (in comments)

Here's Dahl's concern over how Chen dragged him into the mess anyway:

Östen Dahl wrote:

February 21, 2012 @ 8:06 am

It's a bit scary to see your own analyses invoked in this kind of discussion. But let me note here that the way Keith Chen describes them they sound much more categorical than they are in my own texts. In the paper from the EUROTYP volumes (Dahl 2000) that Chen refers to, I discuss the expression of future time reference in European languages from different points of view. One of the phenomena that I spend some time on is what I call the "futureless area" in Northern Europe, referring to a number of Germanic (excluding English) and Finno-Ugrian languages (also historically including Slavic) which lack inflectional futures and in which future time reference is less systematically marked grammatically than in the rest of Europe. I do not specify a binary classification of European languages (let alone the languages of the world) and I do not use the terms "strong-FTR language" and "weak-FTR language". (In the abstract of his working paper, Chen says "what linguists call strong-FTR languages" — what he should have said is "what I call strong-FTR languages"; Google Scholar yields no hits for the phrase "strong-FTR language" except Chen's own paper.) In my discussion of the "futureless" languages of northern Europe, I focus to some extent on predictive statements such as those found in weather forecasts; in the version of Chen's paper that I have seen, he also takes this as the criterion for distinguishing the two classes of languages he postulates, but in the blog post above, he seems to have forgotten about this and talks of "obligatory marking of FTR" in general. It is quite clear that FTR marking differs cross-linguistically on many parameters for which information is often lacking in grammars; precisely for this reason, a single criterion — inflectional marking — was focused upon in the chapter on future tenses in WALS (Dahl and Velupillai 2005).

The working paper contains a table that purports to analyze countries in which languages are spoken which differ on the FTR parameter; I don't really know what kind of statistics is behind the numbers in this table; for instance, in Nigeria the speakers of the three languages English, Hausa, and Igbo are said to make up 70 percent of the population, but even counting generously the real percentage is no more than 30 (remember that Nigeria is home to around 500 languages).[...]

This blog post says it more succintly (and politely) than I could:

Gene Callahan wrote:

Thursday, February 23, 2012
You Can Find Correlations Where You Want

Economist Keith Chen has done work showing there is a significant correlation between
strong-FTR languages (future time reference) and low savings rates, and weak-FTR languages and higher savings rates.

The difficulty? Well, here's the linguist, Östen Dahl, upon whose work Chen's classification is supposedly based (from the comments section of the above post):

"I do not specify a binary classification of European languages (let alone the languages of the world) and I do not use the terms 'strong-FTR language' and 'weak-FTR language.' (In the abstract of his working paper, Chen says 'what linguists call strong-FTR languages' — what he should have said is 'what I call strong-FTR languages'; Google Scholar yields no hits for the phrase 'strong-FTR language' except Chen's own paper.)"

In other words, Chen has found a strong correlation... based on a distinction that he himself made up, and that linguistics experts say does not have a basis in their science! If the distinction is bogus, then the correlation is surely pure chance.

UPDATE: An important point here, I think: Dahl writes, "It is quite clear that FTR marking differs cross-linguistically on many parameters for which information is often lacking in grammars..."

So, if a linguist who studies these things for a living is asked, "Does language X differentiate the future from the present?" he is likely to say, "In some ways, 'yes,' and in others, 'no.'" But such fuzziness can't be tolerated if you want to do a "hard," quantitative study. So Chen was forced to invent a binary distinction where none exists.
Posted by Gene Callahan at 10:31 AM

As someone who's hard-wired for economics among other things, I find it galling that Chen could put out such a paper and that it's up for publication in the American Economic Review. Economists have a bad enough rap these days because of their being associated with the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent austerity packages and bailing out of banks, but to have Chen spout off in print and on TED with this even though the linguistic foundation for has been made shaky to put it charitably, well, you can draw your own conclusions...

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