Language Savings Rates Thinking and Economic Development

Culture and Economics
If you have been reading along here, you realize that I am smitten by the idea that our culture, or better, how we think, has a lot to do with the economic differences among countries.  My best summary of this is back a few years - you can read it here: http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2011/01/culture-and-developing-nations.html

I just had some additional insights along those lines which are very interesting.

Language Savings Rates
This is a TED talk by a Chinese researcher which correlates the language one speaks with savings rates. You can find it here.  http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/19/5-examples-of-how-the-languages-we-speak-can-affect-the-way-we-think/

You will find the TED talk there, as well as some additional information which this researcher has discovered - which is all quite amazing.

The speaker notes that in Chinese, he has to provide a lot more information just to identify his uncle. "The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger."

 He also notes that in Chinese, there is no real "future" tense. With some global research, he discovered that languages with a future tense correlate with a higher savings rate!  He can actually compare comparable people in the same country who speak different languages - say Flemish and Dutch speakers in Belgium - and the language with the future tense has a higher savings rate.

The same effect is found in similar "future" things - like smoking, obesity, health choices, use of condoms, etc.

I had seen this effect once before in a story about a class in international relations.  The author Geert Hofstede mentions it in his book, Cultures and Organizations. In these sessions, almost everyone spoke both English and French. When the instructors conducted the class in English, the working groups quickly got into practical solutions. When they conducted it in French, the groups would talk forever, and rarely get to practical things. I find my own brain goes to a different place when I am speaking French, or another language.  Your native tongue will influence you, but it does not prevail when you are speaking a different one.  Interesting.

Causality
He notes that Spanish and Japanese tend to say things like, "The lamp was broken".  In English, people tend to say, "Joe broke the lamp". For the Spanish and Japanese speakers, they may not actually remember WHO broke it - that is not the significant thing.  Their criminal justice system also tends to focus on repairing the damage, rather than punishing the perpetrator - which is the focus of the English criminal justice system.

What to do with this
He holds out some hope that these "constraints" on people can be "overcome".  I am not quite sure how that works.  These are not 'good' or 'bad' things - they are simply things - traits of a culture or language.  They change very slowly.  I guess if you bring them to people's attention, then they can work harder to overcome them when they become a problem.  For example, here in MN we have a "victim's advocate" role for our court system, so we do not forget the need to make the victim whole.  I am not quite sure how you enforce saving rates or healthy behavior, but that would certainly be a fruitful area for research.  Daniel Kannehman advocates something similar for making decisions, since our "fast brain" tends to overwhelm our rational thinking.  We could teach these things in gradeschool, along with reading and math.  This is how humans think, at least in this culture and language.