WEBVTT

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Thank you very much.

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So in the spirit
of this afternoon's conference,

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I want to take this opportunity

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to talk with you a little bit
about some new work I'm doing

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and how it all started -

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because I saw a map
that really freaked me out.

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Let me show you that map

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and give you a little bit of background.

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Just to start things off and explain,

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I'm a behavioral economist here at Yale.

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And so, one of the things I study
is how people make decisions over time:

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So, how people think about the future

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and how people think about the future
that influences their behavior

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with respect to saving,
with respect to studying for your exams,

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with respect to sticking to a diet,
with respect to quitting smoking.

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Now, what about this map
freaked me out in particular?

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So let me just say this was a map

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that was released
by the European Science Foundation

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in the late 1990s.

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And in particular what freaked me out
was this area in blue.

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Let me put it on a different map
so it's a little bit easier to recognize.

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What this is is a map of Northern Europe.

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And what really, really
kind of threw me for a curve

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was that the European Science Foundation
had released a report

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that a number of kind of very, very
reputable researchers

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had claimed that all of the areas
inside this blue region

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were utterly and totally futureless.

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(Laughter)

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That's something
of an extreme statement.

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So I mean, as an economist,
I'm someone used to, for example,

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making predictions that go horribly awry,

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but this almost takes the cake.

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You know, perhaps
with the exception of Iceland -

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you can think about current
European financial crisis -

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and the other areas inside this blue area

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actually are almost perfectly
the countries that are doing the best.

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And as an economist,

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what I would say is it seems crazy
to call these places futureless.

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I mean, these places
are all full of countries

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that are saving a tremendous
amount of money,

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households that are saving
a tremendous amount of money,

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countries that don't have
problems with their bonds

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and are investing a tremendous amount
in public infrastructure

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and in the future -

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they just seem to care a lot
about the future.

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What I realized that led
to this confusion, though,

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is that the team of researchers
at the European Science Foundation

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led by kind of a superstar
named Austin Dole,

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they weren't talking about
what an economist would mean

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when they say that a place is futureless,

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because this was a team of linguists,

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and what they were saying
was that, in fact,

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not that the households in this region
don't kind of care about the future,

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but that the languages in this region
don't really talk about the future

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in the same way that languages
outside this area talk.

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And what that led me to think about -

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which I'm going to tell you
a little bit about right now -

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is the connection between economics,
how you feel about the future

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and how your language forces you
to talk about the future.

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Okay. Let me explain a little bit
about what that means.

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So, for example - you can probably tell -

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I'm Chinese,

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and, you know, growing up I realized

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that Chinese families are different
in many interesting ways.

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What's a little bit subtle -

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and that I didn't realize
till much later -

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is that the Chinese language
actually forces Chinese speakers

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to talk about families
in subtly different ways.

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So let me give you an example.

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Suppose that a bunch of your friends
come to you and say,

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"Would you like to go out for dinner?"

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If you were speaking English
with your friends,

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you could say, "You know,
that sounds great.

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I'm really, really sorry, though,
I have an uncle in town,

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and tomorrow I'm going
to go out to dinner with him."

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Now, if you were speaking Chinese
to your friends instead,

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actually, Chinese the language

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would force you to include
a lot more information

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that I didn't just say.

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So, for example, there is
no general word for uncle in Chinese;

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instead, what you'd have to specify,

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what you'd be forced
by your language to tell your friends

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is whether this was an uncle
on your mother's side of the family

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or your father's side of the family,

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and in fact, you'd be forced to say

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whether or not this was an uncle
by birth or by marriage.

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So, this is actually a very, very
fundamental characteristic of language.

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And as you see up there,

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the linguist Roman Jakobson
expressed this best

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when he said, "Languages differ
essentially in what they must convey

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and not in what they may convey."

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So in this sense, Chinese is forcing you

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to say a lot to your friends
about the structure of your family

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in ways that if you're an English speaker,

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you could very well think,
"Well, they don't need to know,"

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or "It's none of their business."

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Now, let's get back to Austin Dole
and these kind of European linguists.

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What these linguists at the European
Science Foundation discovered

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was that when they looked
at languages across the globe,

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a lot of global languages,

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what they discovered

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was that languages differ
in a very, very fundamental way

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in the ways they force their speakers
to talk about the future.

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And they broke down languages
into two rough categorizations:

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One - I'll call them "weak-FTR,"

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or “weak future
time reference languages” -

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are languages like Chinese,
Finish and German,

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which don't force speakers,
in fact, which allow speakers

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to speak about the future
basically as if it's the present.

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And then other languages,
like English, Greek, Italian and Russian -

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we'll call them "strong-FTR languages" -

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force speakers to grammatically
realize or to speak

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as if the future is something
viscerally different than the present.

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So for example,
when I was just telling you

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how I would talk to my friends 
about taking my uncle out for dinner,

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if I were to say that in Chinese,

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it would be very, very kind of common
and very, very easy for me to just say,

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''I can't go out to dinner tomorrow.
I eat with uncle,''

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whereas to an English speaker,
that just sounds very, very strange.

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Now, a lot of people
when I first showed them this list

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think it's very strange

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because many people in this room

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probably know that English
is a Germanic language

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and that English and German
are close cousins,

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and yet as you can see,

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English and German find themselves
on opposite ends of this divide.

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Many of you probably speak German.

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One way you can think
about this difference is, for example,

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suppose I was going to try and predict
precipitation for tomorrow.

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In German, I could very easily say
"Es regnet morgen"

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or "Morgen regnet es"

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or "Morgen ist es kalt,"

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and that sounds weird
to an English speaker

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because what I'm literally saying

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is "Morning is cold"

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or "Tomorrow it rain"
instead of "Tomorrow it will rain."

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Now, can this have an effect
on your behavior?

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Can this have an effect on your economics?

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Well, I did what, you know, economists
with a crazy idea would do,

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and that is quickly
try and dispel myself of crazy ideas

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by going and looking for as much data
as possible around the world

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and trying to hit it as hardly as I can.

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And let me just summarize
the hypothesis that I was testing for you;

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that is,

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can languages that lead speakers to talk
similarly about the present and the future

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lead those same speakers

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to feel similarly
about the present and the future?

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Now, why might that be important?

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Because if that's true,

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then speakers of those languages
should have an easier time saving,

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should have an easier time
studying for exams,

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should have an easier time
kind of not overeating

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and, for example, should have
an easier time quitting smoking.

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Let me just say, as a broad overview,
that's basically what I find.

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All of those pattern I just told you

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I find in spades in every
major region of the world,

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and no matter of how hard you try
and hit this data and make it go away,

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you can't get this pattern to disappear.

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Let's work through it a bit.

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These are OECD countries
that I put up in front of you.

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What does that mean?

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Well, these are generally rich
kind of first world countries.

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They tend to have open markets
and be liberal democracies.

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We were talking a little bit
about the European financial crisis.

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You can look all the way
over there on the right -

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this is the average savings rate
of countries over the last 25 years -

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and all the way over there
on the right is Greece, okay?

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(Laughter)

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Saving just a little bit over 10%
of their GDP, okay?

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So, you know, that’s not such a surprise;

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we know they've had
a problem with savings.

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It's a little bit impolite
to mention it in this audience,

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but if you noticed,
we're the United States,

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and we’re next in line.

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(Laughter)

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Now, what I want you to notice, though -

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because I've colored a number
of these bars in light blue -

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those light blue bars are those countries
which speak languages

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that don't make a strong distinction
between the present and the future, okay?

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And according to our hypothesis,

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that should make it easier to care
about the future and easier to save.

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What we see is that's very true.

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Now, is this only a feature
of rich countries?

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Is this only a feature
of well-developed economies?

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No, here's a much larger set of countries
from all over the world.

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And what you see this kind
of downwardly sloping line indicates

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is that exact same pattern
seems to hold, you know,

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basically in every
major region of the world.

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If you speak a language

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that doesn't distinguish strongly
between the future and the present,

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you just save a lot more, okay?

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Now, something else
that this graph, well, can show you

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is something which provides an opportunity

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to hit this question much, much more hard.

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And what is that?

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Well, that is all of these countries,

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these seven countries
you see in the middle of the screen,

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these are countries
with multiple national languages.

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And what's fortunate about that

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is in many of these countries,
they have multiple national languages

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and you can literally
try and find families

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who live basically next door
to each other in these countries

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but who speak different languages.

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What is that going to allow us to do?

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That's going to allow us
to look inside countries like Switzerland,

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where you see people who speak German,

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you see people who speak French,

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you see people who speak Italian,

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and you see families that speak Romansh,

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and countries in totally different parts
of the world, like Nigeria,

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where you'll find Hausa speakers
living right next to Yoruba speakers

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living right next to Igbo speakers, okay?

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What am I going to do?

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Well, these are these kinds of -
no, add up won more.

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You've got eight countries
around the world that have this ability.

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And what I’m going to try and do

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is do what epidemiologists do
and find matched pairs of families.

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What does that mean?

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Well, you could imagine -

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suppose I was standing up here on stage
with 1.4 billion buckets, alright?

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And I took each one of you,
and I sorted you into these buckets.

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Based on what?

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Well, based on the country that
your family was born in and is living in;

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the sex and age
of the head of the household;

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income - the exact income
of your household;

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level of education;

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marital status -

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it turns out, in Europe,
there're six different ways to be married;

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the number of children you find
in your household;

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and finally and most powerfully,
what religion you belong to -

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so 72 different world religions.

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Now, that's a lot of buckets -

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1.4 billion.

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So, if you're lucky enough,

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you might find yourself not alone

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but in a bucket with, say,
one other family.

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That might be lucky for you.

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You have a lot to talk about,

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you have a lot in common
with this family.

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Lucky for me as a researcher,

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every now and then, two families
find themselves in the same bucket,

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but they speak languages
that treat the future differently.

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So everything I'm going to tell you
from here and now is true

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even when only comparing those families

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that are basically
on every other dimension identical.

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What do we see?

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What we see is exactly what we predicted,

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even after you hit the data
with that 1.4 billion buckets.

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What we see is that household
that speak languages

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that make a very, very weak distinction
between the present and the future

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are 30% more likely
to save in any given year.

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Remember that's already holding
their income constant.

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They're going to, by the time they retire,
have accumulated 25% more wealth.

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They're going to be 24% less likely
to report having smoked intensively.

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That's like more
than a packet a day for a year

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at any given point in their lives.

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And, you know, not just kind
of monetary behaviors,

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but think about health behaviors:

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they're going to be 30% less likely
to be medically obese,

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they're going to be 24%
less likely to have smoked,

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and on almost every dimension,

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they're going to be in measurably
better health in the long run.

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So grip strength, long capacity,
walking speed, all of these measures,

00:12:01.584 --> 00:12:06.646
you could imagine your cumulative ability
to kind of care about your future self -

00:12:06.646 --> 00:12:09.296
eat better, exercise 
and restrain from smoking.

00:12:09.296 --> 00:12:11.159
All of those things seem to add up

00:12:11.159 --> 00:12:13.888
even when comparing families
in the same bucket.

00:12:16.359 --> 00:12:20.314
I'd like to leave you with this:

00:12:20.964 --> 00:12:23.199
First of all, thank you
very much for listening.

00:12:23.199 --> 00:12:24.576
Second of all,

00:12:24.846 --> 00:12:27.857
this is research that's really
only just getting off the ground.

00:12:27.857 --> 00:12:32.150
Right now, a team of linguists,
me, an economist,

00:12:32.150 --> 00:12:34.154
and a number of psychologists here in Yale

00:12:34.154 --> 00:12:35.257
are running experiments

00:12:35.257 --> 00:12:38.042
to try and identify exactly
the psychological mechanisms

00:12:38.042 --> 00:12:40.373
by which these kinds
of relationships are working.

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

00:12:43.732 --> 00:12:46.119
with what I think is a really
exciting new project,

00:12:46.119 --> 00:12:49.198
investigating what economists
have to learn from linguists.

00:12:49.408 --> 00:12:50.478
Thank you very much!

00:12:50.478 --> 00:12:53.962
(Applause) (Cheers)