Keith Chen你存钱的能力跟你用的语言有关？

基思·陈

（

Keith Chen

）

：

你存钱的能力跟你用的语言有关？

The global economic financial crisis has reignited public interestin something

that's actually one of the oldest questions in economics,dating back to at least

before Adam that is, why is it that countries with seemingly

similar economies and institutionscan display radically different savings

behavior?

Now, many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this

question,and as a field we've made a tremendous amount of headwayand we

understand a lot about I'm here to talk with you about today is an

intriguing new hypothesisand some surprisingly powerful new findings that

I've been working onabout the link between the structure of the language you

speakand how you find yourself with the propensity to me tell you a

little bit about savings rates, a little bit about language,and then I'll draw that

connection.

Let's start by thinking about the member countries of the OECD,or the

Organization of Economic Cooperation and countries,

by and large, you should think about theseas the richest, most industrialized

countries in the by joining the OECD, they were affirming a

common commitmentto democracy, open markets and free e all

of these similarities, we see huge differences in savings behavior.

So all the way over on the left of this graph,what you see is many OECD

countries saving over a quarter of their GDP every year,and some OECD

countries saving over a third of their GDP per g down the right

flank of the OECD, all the way on the other side, is what you can

see is that over the last 25 years,Greece has barely managed to save more than

10 percent of their should be noted, of course, that the United States

and the U.K. are the next in line.

Now that we see these huge differences in savings rates,how is it possible that

language might have something to do with these differences?Let me tell you a

little bit about how languages fundamentally sts and cognitive

scientists have been exploring this question for many years then I'll

draw the connection between these two behaviors.

Many of you have probably already noticed that I'm Chinese.I grew up in the

Midwest of the United something I realized quite early onwas that

the Chinese language forced me to speak about and --in fact, more

fundamentally than that --ever so slightly forced me to think about family in

very different ways.

Now, how might that be? Let me give you an e I were talking

with you and I was introducing you to my understood exactly

what I just said in we were speaking Mandarin Chinese with each

other, though,I wouldn't have that luxury.I wouldn't have been able to

convey so little my language would have forced me to

do,instead of just telling you,

amount of additional language would force me to tell

youwhether or not this was an uncle on my mother's side or my father's

side,whether this was an uncle by marriage or by birth,and if this man was

my father's brother,whether he was older than or younger than my

of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn't let me ignore in fact,

if I want to speak correctly,Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.

Now, that fascinated me endlessly as a child,but what fascinates me even

more today as an economistis that some of these same differences carry

through to how languages speak about for example, if I'm speaking in

English, I have to speak grammatically differentlyif I'm talking about past

rain,

will rain tomorrow.

respect to the timing of ? Because I have to consider thatand I

have to modify what I'm saying to say,

simply not permissible in English to say,

In contrast to that, that's almost exactly what you would say in Chinese.A

Chinese speaker can basically say somethingthat sounds very strange to an

English speaker's can say,

spectrumin the same way that English forces us to constantly do in order to

speak correctly.

Is this difference in languagesonly between very, very distantly related

languages, like English and Chinese?Actually, many of you know, in

this room, that English is a Germanic you may not have

realized is that English is actually an is the only Germanic language

that requires example, most other Germanic language speakersfeel

completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrowby saying,

regnet es,

This led me, as a behavioral economist, to an intriguing

how you speak about time, could how your language forces you to think

about time,affect your propensity to behave across time?You speak English, a

futured what that means is that every time you discuss the

future,or any kind of a future event,grammatically you're forced to cleave that

from the presentand treat it as if it's something viscerally

suppose that that visceral differencemakes you subtly dissociate the future

from the present every time you that's true and it makes the future

feellike something more distant and more different from the present,that's

going to make it harder to , on the other hand, you speak a futureless

language,the present and the future, you speak about them that

subtly nudges you to feel about them identically,that's going to make it easier

to save.

Now this is a fanciful theory.I'm a professor, I get paid to have fanciful

how would you actually go about testing such a theory?Well,

what I did with that was to access the linguistics interestingly

enough, there are pockets of futureless language speakerssituated all over the

is a pocket of futureless language speakers in Northern

stingly enough, when you start to crank the data,these pockets

of futureless language speakers all around the worldturn out to be, by and

large, some of the world's best savers.

Just to give you a hint of that,let's look back at that OECD graph that we were

talking you see is that these bars are systematically tallerand

systematically shifted to the leftcompared to these bars which are the

members of the OECD that speak futured is the average

difference here?Five percentage points of your GDP saved per 25

years that has huge long-run effects on the wealth of your nation.

Now while these findings are suggestive,countries can be different in so many

different waysthat it's very, very difficult sometimes to account for all of these

possible I'm going to show you, though, is something that

I've been engaging in for a year,which is trying to gather all of the largest

datasetsthat we have access to as economists,and I'm going to try and strip

away all of those possible differences,hoping to get this relationship to

just in summary, no matter how far I push this, I can't get it to

me show you how far you can do that.

One way to imagine that is I gather large datasets from around the

for example, there is the Survey of Health, [Aging] and Retirement in

this dataset you actually learn that retired European familiesare

extremely patient with survey takers.(Laughter)So imagine that you're a

retired household in Belgium and someone comes to your front door.

me, would you mind if I peruse your stock portfolio?Do you happen to know

how much your house is worth? Do you mind telling me?Would you happen

to have a hallway that's more than 10 meters long?If you do, would you mind

if I timed how long it took you to walk down that hallway?Would you mind

squeezing as hard as you can, in your dominant hand, this deviceso I can

measure your grip strength?How about blowing into this tube so I can

measure your lung capacity?

that with a Demographic and Health Surveycollected by USAID in

developing countries in Africa, for example,which that survey actually can go

so far as to directly measure the HIV statusof families living in, for example,

rural e that with a world value survey,which measures the

political opinions and, fortunately for me, the savings behaviorsof millions of

families in hundreds of countries around the world.

Take all of that data, combine it, and this map is what you you find

is nine countries around the worldthat have significant native

populationswhich speak both futureless and futured what I'm

going to do is form statistical matched pairsbetween families that are nearly

identical on every dimension that I can measure,and then I'm going to explore

whether or not the link between language and savings holdseven after

controlling for all of these levels.

What are the characteristics we can control for?Well I'm going to match

families on country of birth and residence,the demographics -- what sex, their

age --their income level within their own country,their educational

achievement, a lot about their family turns out there are six

different ways to be married in most granularly, I break them

down by religionwhere there are 72 categories of religions in the world --so an

extreme level of are 1.4 billion different ways that a family

can find itself.

Now effectively everything I'm going to tell you from now onis only

comparing these basically nearly identical 's getting as close as

possible to the thought experimentof finding two families both of whom live

in Brusselswho are identical on every single one of these dimensions,but one

of whom speaks Flemish and one of whom speaks French;or two families that

live in a rural district in Nigeria,one of whom speaks Hausa and one of whom

speaks Igbo.

Now even after all of this granular level of control,do futureless language

speakers seem to save more?Yes, futureless language speakers, even after this

level of control,are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given

this have cumulative effects?Yes, by the time they retire, futureless

language speakers, holding constant their income,are going to retire with 25

percent more in savings.

Can we push this data even further?Yes, because I just told you, we actually

collect a lot of health data as how can we think about health

behaviors to think about savings?Well, think about smoking, for

g is in some deep sense negative savings is current

pain in exchange for future pleasure,smoking is just the 's current

pleasure in exchange for future we should expect then is the

opposite that's exactly what we less language speakers

are 20 to 24 percent less likelyto be smoking at any given point in time

compared to identical families,and they're going to be 13 to 17 percent less

likelyto be obese by the time they retire,and they're going to report being 21

percent more likelyto have used a condom in their last sexual encounter.I

could go on and on with the list of differences that you can 's almost

impossible not to find a savings behaviorfor which this strong effect isn't

present.

My linguistics and economics colleagues at Yale and I are just starting to do

this workand really explore and understand the ways that these subtle

nudgescause us to think more or less about the future every single time we

tely, the goal,once we understand how these subtle effects can

change our decision making,we want to be able to provide people toolsso that

they can consciously make themselves better saversand more conscious

investors in their own future.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

全球金融危 机让人们对早在亚当

·

斯密时代就被提出的一个古老的经济学问 题重

新产生了兴趣：

“

为什么经济规模 和政治体制看起来相似的国家之间，国民的储

蓄习惯差别如此之大？

”

已经有很多经济学大师花毕生精力研究了这个问题，< /p>

取得了很大的进展，

我们对

这个问题也有 了很深的认识。

我今天要跟大家分享的是一个很有意思的假说，

我

研究了人们说的语言的

（语法）

结构 和他们的存钱习惯之间的关系，

并得到了一

些意外的新发现。< /p>

我们先介绍国民储蓄比率，

再介绍语言差别，

然后我们把这两

者联系起来。