1
00:00:10,072 --> 00:00:11,784
Thank you very much.

2
00:00:12,264 --> 00:00:14,785
So in the spirit
of this afternoon's conference,

3
00:00:14,785 --> 00:00:16,265
I want to take this opportunity

4
00:00:16,265 --> 00:00:19,026
to talk with you a little bit
about some new work I'm doing

5
00:00:19,246 --> 00:00:20,397
and how it all started -

6
00:00:20,397 --> 00:00:23,209
because I saw a map
that really freaked me out.

7
00:00:23,919 --> 00:00:25,752
Let me show you that map

8
00:00:25,752 --> 00:00:27,767
and give you a little bit of background.

9
00:00:27,767 --> 00:00:30,165
Just to start things off and explain,

10
00:00:30,165 --> 00:00:32,724
I'm a behavioral economist here at Yale.

11
00:00:32,724 --> 00:00:37,224
And so, one of the things I study
is how people make decisions over time:

12
00:00:37,224 --> 00:00:39,569
So, how people think about the future

13
00:00:39,569 --> 00:00:42,882
and how people think about the future
that influences their behavior

14
00:00:42,882 --> 00:00:46,878
with respect to saving,
with respect to studying for your exams,

15
00:00:46,878 --> 00:00:50,729
with respect to sticking to a diet,
with respect to quitting smoking.

16
00:00:51,009 --> 00:00:54,306
Now, what about this map
freaked me out in particular?

17
00:00:54,306 --> 00:00:55,879
So let me just say this was a map

18
00:00:55,879 --> 00:00:58,312
that was released
by the European Science Foundation

19
00:00:58,312 --> 00:00:59,988
in the late 1990s.

20
00:00:59,988 --> 00:01:03,621
And in particular what freaked me out
was this area in blue.

21
00:01:03,621 --> 00:01:07,250
Let me put it on a different map
so it's a little bit easier to recognize.

22
00:01:07,250 --> 00:01:10,102
What this is is a map of Northern Europe.

23
00:01:10,102 --> 00:01:13,473
And what really, really
kind of threw me for a curve

24
00:01:13,473 --> 00:01:16,597
was that the European Science Foundation
had released a report

25
00:01:16,597 --> 00:01:19,576
that a number of kind of very, very
reputable researchers

26
00:01:19,576 --> 00:01:22,726
had claimed that all of the areas
inside this blue region

27
00:01:22,726 --> 00:01:25,081
were utterly and totally futureless.

28
00:01:25,421 --> 00:01:27,618
(Laughter)

29
00:01:28,928 --> 00:01:31,255
That's something
of an extreme statement.

30
00:01:32,507 --> 00:01:35,685
So I mean, as an economist,
I'm someone used to, for example,

31
00:01:35,685 --> 00:01:38,310
making predictions that go horribly awry,

32
00:01:38,820 --> 00:01:41,266
but this almost takes the cake.

33
00:01:41,656 --> 00:01:44,526
You know, perhaps
with the exception of Iceland -

34
00:01:44,526 --> 00:01:50,062
you can think about current
European financial crisis -

35
00:01:50,062 --> 00:01:52,638
and the other areas inside this blue area

36
00:01:52,638 --> 00:01:56,557
actually are almost perfectly
the countries that are doing the best.

37
00:01:56,784 --> 00:01:57,777
And as an economist,

38
00:01:57,777 --> 00:02:01,055
what I would say is it seems crazy
to call these places futureless.

39
00:02:01,055 --> 00:02:04,207
I mean, these places
are all full of countries

40
00:02:04,207 --> 00:02:06,304
that are saving a tremendous
amount of money,

41
00:02:06,304 --> 00:02:08,924
households that are saving
a tremendous amount of money,

42
00:02:08,924 --> 00:02:11,306
countries that don't have
problems with their bonds

43
00:02:11,306 --> 00:02:14,387
and are investing a tremendous amount
in public infrastructure

44
00:02:14,387 --> 00:02:15,391
and in the future -

45
00:02:15,391 --> 00:02:17,626
they just seem to care a lot
about the future.

46
00:02:17,971 --> 00:02:20,530
What I realized that led
to this confusion, though,

47
00:02:20,530 --> 00:02:23,673
is that the team of researchers
at the European Science Foundation

48
00:02:23,673 --> 00:02:26,475
led by kind of a superstar
named Austin Dole,

49
00:02:26,828 --> 00:02:29,502
they weren't talking about
what an economist would mean

50
00:02:29,502 --> 00:02:31,468
when they say that a place is futureless,

51
00:02:31,468 --> 00:02:33,700
because this was a team of linguists,

52
00:02:33,910 --> 00:02:36,197
and what they were saying
was that, in fact,

53
00:02:36,197 --> 00:02:40,246
not that the households in this region
don't kind of care about the future,

54
00:02:40,246 --> 00:02:44,255
but that the languages in this region
don't really talk about the future

55
00:02:44,255 --> 00:02:47,147
in the same way that languages
outside this area talk.

56
00:02:47,147 --> 00:02:48,914
And what that led me to think about -

57
00:02:48,914 --> 00:02:51,632
which I'm going to tell you
a little bit about right now -

58
00:02:51,632 --> 00:02:54,724
is the connection between economics,
how you feel about the future

59
00:02:54,724 --> 00:02:57,435
and how your language forces you
to talk about the future.

60
00:02:57,435 --> 00:03:00,350
Okay. Let me explain a little bit
about what that means.

61
00:03:00,850 --> 00:03:03,351
So, for example - you can probably tell -

62
00:03:03,351 --> 00:03:04,644
I'm Chinese,

63
00:03:04,644 --> 00:03:07,213
and, you know, growing up I realized

64
00:03:07,213 --> 00:03:10,522
that Chinese families are different
in many interesting ways.

65
00:03:10,522 --> 00:03:11,860
What's a little bit subtle -

66
00:03:11,860 --> 00:03:13,907
and that I didn't realize
till much later -

67
00:03:13,907 --> 00:03:17,212
is that the Chinese language
actually forces Chinese speakers

68
00:03:17,212 --> 00:03:21,038
to talk about families
in subtly different ways.

69
00:03:21,038 --> 00:03:22,472
So let me give you an example.

70
00:03:22,472 --> 00:03:26,145
Suppose that a bunch of your friends
come to you and say,

71
00:03:26,805 --> 00:03:28,818
"Would you like to go out for dinner?"

72
00:03:29,884 --> 00:03:32,077
If you were speaking English
with your friends,

73
00:03:32,077 --> 00:03:34,175
you could say, "You know,
that sounds great.

74
00:03:34,175 --> 00:03:36,888
I'm really, really sorry, though,
I have an uncle in town,

75
00:03:36,888 --> 00:03:39,364
and tomorrow I'm going
to go out to dinner with him."

76
00:03:39,781 --> 00:03:42,582
Now, if you were speaking Chinese
to your friends instead,

77
00:03:42,582 --> 00:03:44,011
actually, Chinese the language

78
00:03:44,011 --> 00:03:46,776
would force you to include
a lot more information

79
00:03:46,776 --> 00:03:48,389
that I didn't just say.

80
00:03:48,389 --> 00:03:52,938
So, for example, there is
no general word for uncle in Chinese;

81
00:03:52,938 --> 00:03:54,658
instead, what you'd have to specify,

82
00:03:54,658 --> 00:03:57,376
what you'd be forced
by your language to tell your friends

83
00:03:57,376 --> 00:04:00,376
is whether this was an uncle
on your mother's side of the family

84
00:04:00,376 --> 00:04:02,096
or your father's side of the family,

85
00:04:02,096 --> 00:04:03,768
and in fact, you'd be forced to say

86
00:04:03,768 --> 00:04:06,964
whether or not this was an uncle
by birth or by marriage.

87
00:04:08,046 --> 00:04:11,737
So, this is actually a very, very
fundamental characteristic of language.

88
00:04:11,737 --> 00:04:13,359
And as you see up there,

89
00:04:13,359 --> 00:04:15,676
the linguist Roman Jakobson
expressed this best

90
00:04:15,676 --> 00:04:19,542
when he said, "Languages differ
essentially in what they must convey

91
00:04:19,542 --> 00:04:21,694
and not in what they may convey."

92
00:04:21,694 --> 00:04:24,035
So in this sense, Chinese is forcing you

93
00:04:24,035 --> 00:04:28,431
to say a lot to your friends
about the structure of your family

94
00:04:28,770 --> 00:04:30,829
in ways that if you're an English speaker,

95
00:04:30,829 --> 00:04:33,588
you could very well think,
"Well, they don't need to know,"

96
00:04:33,588 --> 00:04:35,347
or "It's none of their business."

97
00:04:35,347 --> 00:04:39,413
Now, let's get back to Austin Dole
and these kind of European linguists.

98
00:04:39,413 --> 00:04:42,506
What these linguists at the European
Science Foundation discovered

99
00:04:42,506 --> 00:04:45,592
was that when they looked
at languages across the globe,

100
00:04:45,592 --> 00:04:47,410
a lot of global languages,

101
00:04:47,410 --> 00:04:48,414
what they discovered

102
00:04:48,414 --> 00:04:51,170
was that languages differ
in a very, very fundamental way

103
00:04:51,170 --> 00:04:54,581
in the ways they force their speakers
to talk about the future.

104
00:04:54,981 --> 00:04:57,894
And they broke down languages
into two rough categorizations:

105
00:04:57,894 --> 00:04:59,953
One - I'll call them "weak-FTR,"

106
00:04:59,953 --> 00:05:02,357
or “weak future
time reference languages” -

107
00:05:02,357 --> 00:05:05,033
are languages like Chinese,
Finish and German,

108
00:05:05,033 --> 00:05:08,912
which don't force speakers,
in fact, which allow speakers

109
00:05:08,912 --> 00:05:12,963
to speak about the future
basically as if it's the present.

110
00:05:13,215 --> 00:05:16,774
And then other languages,
like English, Greek, Italian and Russian -

111
00:05:16,774 --> 00:05:18,961
we'll call them "strong-FTR languages" -

112
00:05:18,961 --> 00:05:22,098
force speakers to grammatically
realize or to speak

113
00:05:22,098 --> 00:05:25,495
as if the future is something
viscerally different than the present.

114
00:05:25,843 --> 00:05:28,155
So for example,
when I was just telling you

115
00:05:28,155 --> 00:05:32,204
how I would talk to my friends 
about taking my uncle out for dinner,

116
00:05:32,204 --> 00:05:33,780
if I were to say that in Chinese,

117
00:05:33,780 --> 00:05:37,610
it would be very, very kind of common
and very, very easy for me to just say,

118
00:05:37,610 --> 00:05:40,430
''I can't go out to dinner tomorrow.
I eat with uncle,''

119
00:05:41,030 --> 00:05:44,300
whereas to an English speaker,
that just sounds very, very strange.

120
00:05:44,300 --> 00:05:47,166
Now, a lot of people
when I first showed them this list

121
00:05:47,166 --> 00:05:48,323
think it's very strange

122
00:05:48,323 --> 00:05:49,852
because many people in this room

123
00:05:49,852 --> 00:05:52,138
probably know that English
is a Germanic language

124
00:05:52,138 --> 00:05:54,277
and that English and German
are close cousins,

125
00:05:54,277 --> 00:05:55,682
and yet as you can see,

126
00:05:55,952 --> 00:05:59,722
English and German find themselves
on opposite ends of this divide.

127
00:06:00,660 --> 00:06:02,281
Many of you probably speak German.

128
00:06:02,281 --> 00:06:05,092
One way you can think
about this difference is, for example,

129
00:06:05,092 --> 00:06:08,435
suppose I was going to try and predict
precipitation for tomorrow.

130
00:06:09,104 --> 00:06:12,124
In German, I could very easily say
"Es regnet morgen"

131
00:06:12,124 --> 00:06:14,362
or "Morgen regnet es"

132
00:06:14,402 --> 00:06:16,251
or "Morgen ist es kalt,"

133
00:06:16,271 --> 00:06:18,359
and that sounds weird
to an English speaker

134
00:06:18,359 --> 00:06:19,933
because what I'm literally saying

135
00:06:19,933 --> 00:06:21,436
is "Morning is cold"

136
00:06:21,436 --> 00:06:25,686
or "Tomorrow it rain"
instead of "Tomorrow it will rain."

137
00:06:27,196 --> 00:06:31,269
Now, can this have an effect
on your behavior?

138
00:06:31,269 --> 00:06:33,987
Can this have an effect on your economics?

139
00:06:33,987 --> 00:06:40,224
Well, I did what, you know, economists
with a crazy idea would do,

140
00:06:40,224 --> 00:06:43,492
and that is quickly
try and dispel myself of crazy ideas

141
00:06:43,492 --> 00:06:46,588
by going and looking for as much data
as possible around the world

142
00:06:46,588 --> 00:06:48,494
and trying to hit it as hardly as I can.

143
00:06:48,494 --> 00:06:52,673
And let me just summarize
the hypothesis that I was testing for you;

144
00:06:52,863 --> 00:06:53,856
that is,

145
00:06:53,856 --> 00:06:59,634
can languages that lead speakers to talk
similarly about the present and the future

146
00:06:59,634 --> 00:07:00,785
lead those same speakers

147
00:07:00,785 --> 00:07:03,405
to feel similarly
about the present and the future?

148
00:07:03,405 --> 00:07:04,974
Now, why might that be important?

149
00:07:04,974 --> 00:07:06,819
Because if that's true,

150
00:07:06,819 --> 00:07:10,206
then speakers of those languages
should have an easier time saving,

151
00:07:10,206 --> 00:07:12,345
should have an easier time
studying for exams,

152
00:07:12,375 --> 00:07:15,071
should have an easier time
kind of not overeating

153
00:07:15,071 --> 00:07:18,040
and, for example, should have
an easier time quitting smoking.

154
00:07:18,040 --> 00:07:21,504
Let me just say, as a broad overview,
that's basically what I find.

155
00:07:21,504 --> 00:07:23,268
All of those pattern I just told you

156
00:07:23,268 --> 00:07:26,192
I find in spades in every
major region of the world,

157
00:07:26,192 --> 00:07:29,581
and no matter of how hard you try
and hit this data and make it go away,

158
00:07:29,581 --> 00:07:31,485
you can't get this pattern to disappear.

159
00:07:31,485 --> 00:07:33,147
Let's work through it a bit.

160
00:07:33,147 --> 00:07:35,720
These are OECD countries
that I put up in front of you.

161
00:07:35,720 --> 00:07:36,723
What does that mean?

162
00:07:36,723 --> 00:07:39,916
Well, these are generally rich
kind of first world countries.

163
00:07:39,916 --> 00:07:42,629
They tend to have open markets
and be liberal democracies.

164
00:07:42,629 --> 00:07:45,670
We were talking a little bit
about the European financial crisis.

165
00:07:45,670 --> 00:07:48,091
You can look all the way
over there on the right -

166
00:07:48,091 --> 00:07:51,692
this is the average savings rate
of countries over the last 25 years -

167
00:07:51,692 --> 00:07:54,754
and all the way over there
on the right is Greece, okay?

168
00:07:54,754 --> 00:07:55,766
(Laughter)

169
00:07:55,766 --> 00:07:58,824
Saving just a little bit over 10%
of their GDP, okay?

170
00:07:58,824 --> 00:08:00,868
So, you know, that’s not such a surprise;

171
00:08:00,868 --> 00:08:02,868
we know they've had
a problem with savings.

172
00:08:02,868 --> 00:08:05,581
It's a little bit impolite
to mention it in this audience,

173
00:08:05,581 --> 00:08:07,803
but if you noticed,
we're the United States,

174
00:08:07,803 --> 00:08:09,410
and we’re next in line.

175
00:08:09,410 --> 00:08:10,640
(Laughter)

176
00:08:10,640 --> 00:08:12,549
Now, what I want you to notice, though -

177
00:08:12,549 --> 00:08:16,660
because I've colored a number
of these bars in light blue -

178
00:08:16,660 --> 00:08:19,941
those light blue bars are those countries
which speak languages

179
00:08:19,941 --> 00:08:23,697
that don't make a strong distinction
between the present and the future, okay?

180
00:08:23,697 --> 00:08:25,225
And according to our hypothesis,

181
00:08:25,225 --> 00:08:28,563
that should make it easier to care
about the future and easier to save.

182
00:08:28,563 --> 00:08:30,656
What we see is that's very true.

183
00:08:30,656 --> 00:08:33,092
Now, is this only a feature
of rich countries?

184
00:08:33,092 --> 00:08:35,495
Is this only a feature
of well-developed economies?

185
00:08:35,495 --> 00:08:38,836
No, here's a much larger set of countries
from all over the world.

186
00:08:38,836 --> 00:08:42,385
And what you see this kind
of downwardly sloping line indicates

187
00:08:42,385 --> 00:08:45,343
is that exact same pattern
seems to hold, you know,

188
00:08:45,343 --> 00:08:47,444
basically in every
major region of the world.

189
00:08:47,444 --> 00:08:48,546
If you speak a language

190
00:08:48,546 --> 00:08:51,785
that doesn't distinguish strongly
between the future and the present,

191
00:08:51,785 --> 00:08:54,326
you just save a lot more, okay?

192
00:08:54,326 --> 00:08:58,413
Now, something else
that this graph, well, can show you

193
00:08:58,413 --> 00:09:00,626
is something which provides an opportunity

194
00:09:00,666 --> 00:09:03,682
to hit this question much, much more hard.

195
00:09:03,712 --> 00:09:04,706
And what is that?

196
00:09:04,706 --> 00:09:06,466
Well, that is all of these countries,

197
00:09:06,466 --> 00:09:09,177
these seven countries
you see in the middle of the screen,

198
00:09:09,177 --> 00:09:12,641
these are countries
with multiple national languages.

199
00:09:12,641 --> 00:09:14,121
And what's fortunate about that

200
00:09:14,121 --> 00:09:17,545
is in many of these countries,
they have multiple national languages

201
00:09:17,545 --> 00:09:19,804
and you can literally
try and find families

202
00:09:19,804 --> 00:09:23,373
who live basically next door
to each other in these countries

203
00:09:23,723 --> 00:09:26,002
but who speak different languages.

204
00:09:26,287 --> 00:09:28,048
What is that going to allow us to do?

205
00:09:28,048 --> 00:09:31,191
That's going to allow us
to look inside countries like Switzerland,

206
00:09:31,191 --> 00:09:33,002
where you see people who speak German,

207
00:09:33,002 --> 00:09:34,530
you see people who speak French,

208
00:09:34,530 --> 00:09:36,104
you see people who speak Italian,

209
00:09:36,104 --> 00:09:38,643
and you see families that speak Romansh,

210
00:09:38,643 --> 00:09:42,189
and countries in totally different parts
of the world, like Nigeria,

211
00:09:42,189 --> 00:09:46,669
where you'll find Hausa speakers
living right next to Yoruba speakers

212
00:09:46,669 --> 00:09:49,472
living right next to Igbo speakers, okay?

213
00:09:50,454 --> 00:09:51,590
What am I going to do?

214
00:09:51,590 --> 00:09:54,136
Well, these are these kinds of -
no, add up won more -

215
00:09:54,136 --> 00:09:57,282
you've got eight countries
around the world that have this ability.

216
00:09:57,282 --> 00:09:58,806
And what I’m going to try and do

217
00:09:58,806 --> 00:10:02,136
is do what epidemiologists do
and find matched pairs of families.

218
00:10:02,136 --> 00:10:03,137
What does that mean?

219
00:10:03,137 --> 00:10:05,153
Well, you could imagine -

220
00:10:05,153 --> 00:10:09,970
suppose I was standing up here on stage
with 1.4 billion buckets, alright?

221
00:10:09,970 --> 00:10:13,562
And I took each one of you,
and I sorted you into these buckets.

222
00:10:13,562 --> 00:10:14,727
Based on what?

223
00:10:14,727 --> 00:10:18,394
Well, based on the country that
your family was born in and is living in;

224
00:10:18,644 --> 00:10:21,127
the sex and age
of the head of the household;

225
00:10:21,127 --> 00:10:23,906
income - the exact income
of your household;

226
00:10:23,906 --> 00:10:25,203
level of education;

227
00:10:25,203 --> 00:10:26,199
marital status -

228
00:10:26,199 --> 00:10:29,346
it turns out, in Europe,
there're six different ways to be married;

229
00:10:29,346 --> 00:10:31,683
the number of children you find
in your household;

230
00:10:31,683 --> 00:10:34,586
and finally and most powerfully,
what religion you belong to -

231
00:10:34,586 --> 00:10:36,778
so 72 different world religions.

232
00:10:36,778 --> 00:10:38,709
Now, that's a lot of buckets -

233
00:10:38,709 --> 00:10:39,714
1.4 billion.

234
00:10:39,714 --> 00:10:41,049
So, if you're lucky enough,

235
00:10:41,049 --> 00:10:43,153
you might find yourself not alone

236
00:10:43,153 --> 00:10:45,738
but in a bucket with, say,
one other family.

237
00:10:45,738 --> 00:10:47,074
That might be lucky for you.

238
00:10:47,074 --> 00:10:48,457
You have a lot to talk about,

239
00:10:48,457 --> 00:10:50,408
you have a lot in common
with this family.

240
00:10:50,408 --> 00:10:51,991
Lucky for me as a researcher,

241
00:10:51,991 --> 00:10:55,180
every now and then, two families
find themselves in the same bucket,

242
00:10:55,180 --> 00:10:58,360
but they speak languages
that treat the future differently.

243
00:10:58,360 --> 00:11:01,218
So everything I'm going to tell you
from here and now is true

244
00:11:01,218 --> 00:11:03,080
even when only comparing those families

245
00:11:03,080 --> 00:11:06,349
that are basically
on every other dimension identical.

246
00:11:06,349 --> 00:11:07,794
What do we see?

247
00:11:07,794 --> 00:11:09,827
What we see is exactly what we predicted,

248
00:11:09,827 --> 00:11:13,346
even after you hit the data
with that 1.4 billion buckets.

249
00:11:13,346 --> 00:11:17,236
What we see is that household
that speak languages

250
00:11:17,236 --> 00:11:20,889
that make a very, very weak distinction
between the present and the future

251
00:11:20,889 --> 00:11:23,813
are 30% more likely
to save in any given year.

252
00:11:23,813 --> 00:11:26,699
Remember that's already holding
their income constant.

253
00:11:26,699 --> 00:11:31,068
They're going to, by the time they retire,
have accumulated 25% more wealth.

254
00:11:31,708 --> 00:11:36,215
They're going to be 24% less likely
to report having smoked intensively.

255
00:11:36,215 --> 00:11:38,404
That's like more
than a packet a day for a year

256
00:11:38,404 --> 00:11:40,599
at any given point in their lives.

257
00:11:40,599 --> 00:11:43,276
And, you know, not just kind
of monetary behaviors,

258
00:11:43,276 --> 00:11:45,271
but think about health behaviors:

259
00:11:45,271 --> 00:11:49,305
they're going to be 30% less likely
to be medically obese,

260
00:11:49,305 --> 00:11:51,985
they're going to be 24%
less likely to have smoked,

261
00:11:52,005 --> 00:11:53,730
and on almost every dimension,

262
00:11:53,730 --> 00:11:56,731
they're going to be in measurably
better health in the long run.

263
00:11:56,731 --> 00:12:01,584
So grip strength, long capacity,
walking speed, all of these measures,

264
00:12:01,584 --> 00:12:06,646
you could imagine your cumulative ability
to kind of care about your future self -

265
00:12:06,646 --> 00:12:09,296
eat better, exercise 
and restrain from smoking.

266
00:12:09,296 --> 00:12:11,159
All of those things seem to add up

267
00:12:11,159 --> 00:12:13,888
even when comparing families
in the same bucket.

268
00:12:16,359 --> 00:12:20,314
I'd like to leave you with this:

269
00:12:20,964 --> 00:12:23,199
First of all, thank you
very much for listening.

270
00:12:23,199 --> 00:12:24,576
Second of all,

271
00:12:24,846 --> 00:12:27,857
this is research that's really
only just getting off the ground.

272
00:12:27,857 --> 00:12:32,150
Right now, a team of linguists,
me, an economist,

273
00:12:32,150 --> 00:12:34,154
and a number of psychologists here in Yale

274
00:12:34,154 --> 00:12:35,257
are running experiments

275
00:12:35,257 --> 00:12:38,042
to try and identify exactly
the psychological mechanisms

276
00:12:38,042 --> 00:12:40,373
by which these kinds
of relationships are working.

277
00:12:40,373 --> 00:12:43,732
And I invite you all to come to my website
and kind of keep up to date

278
00:12:43,732 --> 00:12:46,119
with what I think is a really
exciting new project,

279
00:12:46,119 --> 00:12:49,198
investigating what economists
have to learn from linguists.

280
00:12:49,408 --> 00:12:50,478
Thank you very much!

281
00:12:50,478 --> 00:12:53,962
(Applause) (Cheers)