Language and savings correlation?
There's been quite a bit of internet buzz this past week about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. You can see his TEDx talk here: Could language affect your way to save money? as well as an attention-grabbing and rather misleading BBC article about his work: Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire . Chen's central hypothesis is that the language you speak may affect your savings behaviour, depending on how your language grammatically encodes statements about the future. (If you're also interested, Chen's working paper can be downloaded here . The Language Log blog actually discussed his work a year ago in two posts: Keith Chen, Whorfian economist , where Geoff Pullum critically examines the linguistics behind the proposal; and Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis , where Mark Liberman questions the interpretation of the statistics. Chen was also invited to write a response to those raised concerns, whic...