
Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire - mediumdeviation
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574
======
WildUtah
This whole idea is wrongheaded because it has correlation and causation
backwards.

The English-speaking world is full of places where it is incredibly expensive
to live a decent lifestyle in retirement. Take the same pension that you
earned in the Anglophonie and then move to France or Spain or Japan or Taiwan
or Mexico and live a comfortable retirement in a supportive community where
your friends and family respect your middle-income wisdom and experience.

Or you can stick to the English-speaking world and be faced with the choice of
a isolation in a soulless suburb abandoned by work-focused family, emotional
abandonment in a nursing home, or paying through the nose for a rare spot in
the few community-oriented cities where people of all ages mix the way they do
in all other world cultures.

Forget planning your 401(k) and get out those flash cards so you can start
practicing.

~~~
Devilboy
You didn't read the article did you

------
JumpCrisscross
Geert Hofstede, an influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics
identified a cultural dimension termed "long-term orientation", defined as
"the extent to which a society shows a pragmatic future-oriented perspective
rather than a conventional historical short-term point of view" [1]. On LTO
the U.S. scores 29, Deutschland 31, and China 118. Respondents in "high-LTO
countries" are pragmatic, believing "less in universal guidelines about what
is good and evil and more in considering the circumstances" [2]. LTO was the
only cultural dimension found to predict per capita economic growth.

The pragmatism probably arises, in part, from the interaction with another
cultural dimension: uncertainty avoidance. UAI is "the extent to which the
members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and
have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these". Uncertainty-
avoidance cultures tend to believe that "there is only one Truth and we have
it. All others are wrong." On UAI the U.S. scores 46, Deutschland 65, and
China 30. While China was shifting from communism to state capitalism Deng
Xiaoping asked "what does the color of the cat matter as long as it catches
mice?"

Marieke de Mooij found in a 2002 study [3] that LTO cultures "are cash or
debit card cultures, not credit card cultures". They also prefer real estate
over mutual funds. Interestingly, "a long-term orientation suggests less
receptivity to e-commerce" because of a reduced "willingness to pay for
convenience".

As an aside regarding cultural blinders, LTO was not detected in Geert
Hofstede's original 1981 research. It took the Chinese Values Survey
"questionnaire, designed by Eastern minds," which, in turn, "did not detect
the uncertainty avoidance dimension" to discover LTO [2]. The original "IBM
and Rokeach Value Survey questionnaires, both designed by Western minds, did
not detect long-versus short-term orientation".

[1] <http://geert-hofstede.com/united-states.html>

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Organizations-Software-
Mind-e...](http://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Organizations-Software-Mind-
ebook/dp/B001C31FRG/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1361603377&sr=8-1)

[3]
[http://home.arcor.de/mba2006/Convergence%20and%20divergence%...](http://home.arcor.de/mba2006/Convergence%20and%20divergence%20in%20consumer%20behaviour.pdf)

------
einhverfr
Oh boy, Chomsky vs Whorf round two hundred and thirty three. Time to grab
popcorn.

Some controversies never die and the impact of language on thought and
perception is one of them. Anyway time to go grab a beer while my colorless
green dreams sleep furiously.

BTW the language/thought and language/perception interactions pose problems on
both sides. There is some evidence that how a language refers to directions of
relative objects impacts the perception of the speaker regarding direction
(and that's a mark against Chomsky) but at the same time, if we accepted the
Whorfian hypothesis uncritically than attempts to relabel "crippled" as
"handicapped" would have been the end of it and we wouldn't have gone back to
"disabled" and finally "persons with disabilities." Of those terms,
"handicapped" is the least negative but changing terms did not change really
how people related so it's not as simple as that.

I doubt that large-scale and long-term patterns are that dependent on
language. It may be that immediate, small-scale patterns are more dependent
but as you scale out the sorts of solutions to problems we all have to
navigate become much more restrained so I don't think the thesis can be as
simple as it is put forward here.

------
redact207
Mandarin, primarily spoken in countries that don't have a pension or adequate
health care versus English, spoken widely in countries that generally do have
pensions and adequate health care. Also where's the cultural correlation
studies? Chinese culture places a huge emphasis on fortune, wealth and luck.

~~~
Inufu
I thought so too at first, but:

> But he says his research has controlled for all these factors, by
> concentrating on nine multi-lingual countries: Belgium, Burkina Faso,
> Ethiopia, Estonia, DR Congo, Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore, and Switzerland.

~~~
redact207
Thanks for your reply, though I still think the research is flawed. I'm
Australian but living & working Singapore, which is right next to Malaysia.

Here, it's a country that's well developed, has a high level of education and
does have a pension (called CPF). The average local salary is SGD $2,000 per
month and I can tell you the CPF does not provide enough for retirement.
There's a back-to-work program that effectively lets those well into their
retirement (70s, 80s) go back to work, and heartbreakingly they end up
clearing tables, washing dishes or serving down at the local McDonalds.

Culture-wise, Singapore is predominantly Chinese. In fact they're probably
more Chinese than China - many of the old traditions that aren't followed in
China still happen here like the "Hungry ghost" and "Yu sheng". Come Chinese
new year, "red packet" culture is alive and well, with the holiday seen as a
chance for your relatives to be happy of all the wealth and prosperity you've
accumulated over the year. Have an aunt who lives in near poverty? She'll be
so happy that you drive around in a $120,000 car.

Malaysia is a slightly different story. It's split into Chinese Malaysia, and
indigenous Malaysia. If you've ever been to Malaysia, you'll quickly
understand that there is a need to look after your own family rather than
trust anything to the government. It's notoriously corrupt. I stupidly drove a
car with Singaporean plates to Kuala Lumpur, and was such an easy target for
traffic police where unsurprisingly everything could be fixed by paying a
'fine.' If you get sick in places like this, your ability to get better
depends on your ability to pay enough to get the better doctors and get
prioritized up the waiting queue. If you're poor, good luck.

So no, I don't accept that the research has controlled for all these factors.
I see it as an attempt from a failed linguistics professor to attach meaning
where there is none.

------
DigitalTurk
> "You can find families that live right next door to each other, have exactly
> the same education levels, exactly the same income and even exactly same
> religion.

However, because they speak a different language they might have gone to
different schools, have a different sense of humor, watch different TV
channels, read different newspapers, and be interested in the events or
culture of different countries.

Moreover, in a few of the countries listed the different language groups tend
to live in different regions, which can have very different economies.

~~~
DigitalTurk
Here's a gaffe.

The author says that Belgium has large 'Flemish' and French speaking
populations, but then when he talks about Brussels he says there are large
Dutch and French speaking populations.

In at least one table he lists Dutch and Flemish separately.

Is he suggesting that Dutch speakers in Brussels and Dutch speakers in
Flanders really speak a different language? :-D

------
Jam0864
This makes perfect sense; we think of programming languages changing the way
solutions are designed all the time. That's why we learn so many different
ones.

Unfortunately I doubt this will be proven at any time in the near future... it
is nearly impossible to isolate this characteristic from other factors.

------
kleiba
_If I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can't attend a
meeting later today, I could not say 'I go to a seminar', English grammar
would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'._

That seems like a pretty poor (no pun intended) example, given that "I am
going to a seminar" uses present tense (present progressive) to describe a
future event.

(A different reading of the above quote suggests that the second form is
supposed to be "I am going to go to a seminar.")

~~~
smugengineer69
It's a poor Mandarin example also. You would likely say "there is a seminar",
or "I intend to go to a seminar". Both are also perfectly valid English
examples, I should add, and convey similar time information. There is also an
auxiliary, the Mandarin 要, which is used very similar to our "will" in most
future situations.

What we call "tense" is actually a pretty fuzzy category, and at a general
level is just the "grammaticalization of time reference", meaning the
transition of a word from the expression of concrete content to an abstract
time-related function word. This in all languages is a constantly evolving
process and can occur over a long period of time and to different degrees.
English hasn't even fully grammaticalized the notion of the future, as our
future and present tenses are morphologically identical.

Which brings up another point: both English and Mandarin lack elaborate
morphological change, relying on auxiliaries to convey tense rather than
explicit verbal modifications. Where do we draw the line here? At the end of
the day, was the collapse of the Roman empire due to the richness of the
morphological tense marking of Latin?

------
trhtrsh
According to Chen's theory of time-compresion, a Mandarin speak who tries to
say "I will spend money" [in the future], will say "I spend money", and spend
money now.

~~~
drucken
It sounds more like time-overlap than "time-compression".

So, your future self is your current self. Anything you do right now is your
future.

------
nnq
> English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go
> to a seminar'.

Isn't "am going" a "present tense". That's how I perceive it a least, and
indeed, it gives me the feeling of seeing the "future in the present tense",
in the way of weak LTR. My native language is 'weak FTR', thought not in the
list of researched ones. But I speak English "close to native" and tend to
just "think in English" a lot, especially for topics for which all my learning
material was in English. But I never felt "present tense continuous" when used
as future anything different than just using the present tense for the future
in my native language.

 _Does this mean that although I speak English close to native level, I
actually have a different "understanding/feeling" of it than you true native
English speakers?_

(of course, to even think along the lines of the study I need tons of
"suspension of disbelief" and need to ignore that there are zillions of
ignored variables and _no freaking way_ to determine _direction of causality_
at this level! ...but just pretending it makes some sense :) ...)

EDIT: my bad, I looked at the actual paper and saw that my language was
evaluated and is "strong FTR", just like English. So our use "present for
future" is just like the "present continuous for future" in English, just a
"spoken language shortcut" and we also have real proper future sense, like all
other latin Languages. Even matches our "almost american style" pattern of
spending and saving. I should remember never to start talking after reading an
article based on a paper: I'd better shut up before reading the paper as
science-reporters always manage to distort or ambiguate stuff... sigh...

~~~
einhverfr
English tenses are so much fun. She speaks Japanese but right now she's
speaking English. The factory makes toys, but right now it is closed for the
night.

But when we get to Malay, things get really weird. Malay doesn't have tenses.
You express timeframe with additional words. It does however have something
like a tense, namely a sort of "bounding" quality but that's not like bounded
vs unbounded aspects in English since bounding may occur either in time, in
manner, or in social convention. Thus one can reduplicate for emphasis, to
imply continuation, to imply reciprocity, or to imply a relaxation of social
convention. Consequently we'd reduplicate the verb for "to beat" if we wanted
to say "he frequently beats his son" or "give" if we wanted to say "they gave
eachother gifts," or "walk" to mean "take a stroll," or "arrived" to indicate
that in fact they arrived suddenly and unexpectedly. (Reduplication of nouns
looks kind of like pluralization but it also involves an unbounding rather
than a true pluralization.)

~~~
nnq
That's odd, as such a language would benefit most from a "word for letter"
writing system like the Chinese one, yet Malay ended up being written in jawi
arabic alphabet. I wonder if there are other languages with this type of
"mismatch" between the writing system / alphabet and the language structure...

------
argumentum
Correlation/causation?

~~~
coldtea
No, merely Shapir/Wolf hypothesis.

It doesn't even need the correlation part, you can deduce similar conclusions
merely from studying each language without real world input.

~~~
archangel_one
I think you mean Sapir-Whorf. My understanding was that's not been proven to a
sufficient extent to use it as any kind of hard evidence that language
influences complex decisions like long-term financial planning.

~~~
coldtea
Well, they didn't use Sapir-Whorf to prove that "language influences complex
decisions like long-term financial planning".

They did their own research, from scratch, to see if that happens, research
that would also help to prove Sapir-Whorf.

------
ValentineC
Here's the TEDGlobal talk on the subject by Keith Chen himself, uploaded two
days ago:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affe...](http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affect_your_ability_to_save_money.html)

------
luketych
We don't need even need to look at the science formally. We can look at it at
a different level. If we know a little about how the brain works then a
phenomenon like this might become obvious.

Language affects how you think, there is no question about that. People who
have a dirtier vocabulary will think dirtier, people who have a more formal
vocabulary with think more formally, etc. If the language you speak makes it
harder to talk dirty then you will probably talk less dirty. This will in-turn
affect how you think.

There is a native tribe that does not have words for left, right, ahead or
behind, but instead they relate every direction to the cardinal directions.
So, instead of referring to your foot as your left foot, this native tribe
will sometimes refer to it as your west foot, sometimes as your northeast
foot, etc. This simple example shows how different your thought patterns can
be based on what words you use. These natives will always have in their minds
where north is, where any "normal" outsider will have to spend a second or two
locating north first. Their brains are almost set up to think in a different
way.

Language is complex as hell, but it makes sense that if a word, or expression
is used more often in one culture than another, that its speakers will be more
influenced by that word or expression. Can you imagine if in English there was
no easy way to say "sex"? In English there are dozens of ways to refer to sex
and other sexual acts, and many only take one or two syllables. What if the
easiest way to refer to sex was to say a 5-syllable word? I bet that would
have some influence on how much we think about sex. We might still be able to
think of the act of sex easily (the images, memories in our heads), but
thinking about/using the word will take too much energy and as a result will
be used less. Can you imagine if the word "sex" was used less on TV, in music,
etc. simply because the word was too long and no longer fit nicely within the
script/lyrics?

Now, it's not too much of a leap to see that having a language where present-
tense and future-tense are less distinct from each other will influence the
speaker of that language into making less of a distinction between the present
& future.

How much influence? Who knows? That, we need formal, nitty-gritty science for.

~~~
pfedor
_Language affects how you think, there is no question about that._

Quite to the contrary, it is an old and tired notion which has been refuted
and refuted and refuted (see, e.g., the third chapter of "The Stuff of
Thought" by Steven Pinker) and yet it can't die because some people just find
it too appealing to let go.

~~~
coldtea
Only the refutation is not very convincing. Not everybody agrees to Anglo-
Saxon postulates on language.

------
vorg
English speakers tend to think of time as going from behind to ahead, whereas
Chinese speakers think of time as going from top (上) to bottom (下). It's hard
to break the habit of saying "next week"(下个星期) in Chinese when I mean "last
week", and many Chinese speakers have a similar problem. In fact, I'd say
English-speakers' primary metaphor for time is _climbing a mountain_ ,
indicating working to move forward in time, making us _more_ likely to save.

~~~
free652
Actually I am not getting these concepts at all.

Time doesn't move at all. Feb 23 2013 7:32:14AM is always at the same spot.

~~~
JBiserkov
The value Feb 23 2013 7:32:14AM never changes, but the result of the function
now() does change from time to time.

I don't know if the above makes any sense to you.

<http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values>

------
free652
So Chinese people on average should have more savings? That doesn't seem like
true, since most of the Chinese elders live with their children...

------
kostyk
That's why i am always broke. P.S. Oh and my native language is Russian.

