13th meeting – Keith Chen: “Could your language affect your ability to save money?”

The third talk that we watched during our 13th meeting was the talk of behavioural economist Keith Chen on whether language has an affect on the ability to save money or not. He introduces a fascinating pattern from his research that languages without a concept for the future — “It rain tomorrow,” instead of “It will rain tomorrow” — correlate strongly with high savings rates.

This might explain why Turkey, having a futured language, has low saving tendencies as compared to countries like Germany, having a future-less language, have high tendencies!