DOES YOUR LANGUAGE AFFECT HOW MUCH YOU SAVE? (COMMENT)

DOES YOUR LANGUAGE AFFECT HOW MUCH YOU SAVE? (COMMENT) In a comment on the marshmallow experiment, Andrew sent this link to a paper by Keith Chen which argues that how much you save is affected by the language you speak. I could only get the abstract of the paper at the link, but this Yale site (Keith Chen is a behavioral economist at the Yale School of Management) has a helpful summary of Chen’s work here. Chen argues that people who speak languages which have a future tense (“it will rain tomorrow.”) make less provision for the future than people do who speak languages which permit using the present tense to speak of the future (“It rains tomorrow.”) Chen’s statistical study finds that: “Speakers of languages that do not distinguish between the present and the future save more money, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese….”