Neuhauser Steet, in Munich. Do Germans save more than English speakers because of grammar?
Keith Chen, an economist at the Yale School of Management, recently gave a TED talk about his claim (in a forthcoming paper in American Economic Review) that certain of people’s prudence-related behaviors are attributable to the grammar of future time-reference in the languages they speak.
English speakers say “It will rain tomorrow” (with the future-marking modal auxiliary will), where German speakers would say Morgen regnet es (literally “Tomorrow rains it”), and Germans turn out to save significantly more of their income than English speakers do. This, Chen claims, is no coincidence: Across the world, speakers of languages with grammatically obligatory future marking tend (according to their own questionnaire responses)…