andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2289 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A linguist send me an email with the above title and a link to a paper, “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets,” by M. Keith Chen, which begins: Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented e§ects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice. I ran this by another linguist who confirmed the “lunatic fringe” comme
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1 A linguist send me an email with the above title and a link to a paper, “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets,” by M. [sent-1, score-0.219]
2 Keith Chen, which begins: Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. [sent-2, score-0.189]
3 I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. [sent-3, score-0.477]
4 This prediction arises naturally when well-documented e§ects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. [sent-4, score-0.664]
5 Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. [sent-5, score-0.42]
6 This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. [sent-6, score-0.441]
7 The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. [sent-7, score-0.085]
8 I ran this by another linguist who confirmed the “lunatic fringe” comment and pointed me to this post from Mark Liberman and this followup from Keith Chen. [sent-9, score-0.417]
9 My friend also wrote: I think it’d be well-nigh impossible to separate the effect of speaking West Greenlandic from living in West Greenland, or more reasonably, speaking Finnish from living in Finland. [sent-10, score-0.619]
10 the paper is scheduled to appear in the American Economic Review! [sent-15, score-0.181]
11 Short of Science, Nature, and Psychological Science, that’s probably the most competitive and prestigious journal in the universe. [sent-16, score-0.195]
12 More seriously, this is an interesting case because I have no intuition about the substance of the matter (unlike various examples in psychology and political science). [sent-17, score-0.084]
13 The theoretical microeconomic model in the paper seems ridiculous to me, that’s for sure, but I have no good way to think about the cross-country comparisons, one way or another. [sent-18, score-0.298]
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Introduction: A linguist send me an email with the above title and a link to a paper, “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets,” by M. Keith Chen, which begins: Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented e§ects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice. I ran this by another linguist who confirmed the “lunatic fringe” comme
Introduction: I was updating my Mac and noticed the following: Lots of obscure European languages there. That got me wondering: what’s the least obscure language not on the above list? Igbo? Swahili? Or maybe Tagalog? I did a quick google and found this list of languages by number of native speakers. Once you see the list, the answer is obvious: Hindi, first language of 295 million people, is not on Apple’s list. The next most popular languages not included: Bengali, Punjabi, Javanese, Wu, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu. Wow: most of these are Indian! Then comes Persian and a bunch of others. It turns out that Tagalog, Igbo, and Swahili, are way down on this list with 28 million, 24 million, and 26 million native speakers, respectively. Only 26 million for Swahili? This made me want to check the list of languages by total number of speakers . The ranking of most of the languages isn’t much different, but Swahili is now #10, at 140 million. Hindi and Bengali are still th
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Introduction: Anthropologist Bruce Mannheim reports that a recent well-publicized study on the genetics of native Americans, which used genetic analysis to find “at least three streams of Asian gene flow,” is in fact a confirmation of a long-known fact. Mannheim writes: This three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). Basically, it’s a division among the Eskimo-Aleut languages, which straddle the Bering Straits even today, the Athabaskan languages (which were discovered to be related to a small Siberian language family only within the last few years, not by Greenberg as Wade suggested), and everything else. This is not to say that the results from genetics are unimportant, but it’s good to see how it fits with other aspects of our understanding.
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Introduction: This link on education reform send me to this blog on foreign languages in Canadian public schools: The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. But why? Is it because French is a useful employment skill? Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer effects matter. Being with high achieving peers raises a student’s own achievement level. . . . Several studies have found that Anglophones who can speak French enjoy an earning premium. The question is: do bilingual Anglophones earn more because speaking French is a valuable skill in the workplace? Or do they earn more because they’re on average smarter and more capable people (after all, they’ve mastered two languages)? And the blog features this comments like this : French immersion classes (as opposed to science, maths or any
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Introduction: Erin Jonaitis points us to this article by Christopher Ferguson and Moritz Heene, who write: Publication bias remains a controversial issue in psychological science. . . . that the field often constructs arguments to block the publication and interpretation of null results and that null results may be further extinguished through questionable researcher practices. Given that science is dependent on the process of falsification, we argue that these problems reduce psychological science’s capability to have a proper mechanism for theory falsification, thus resulting in the promulgation of numerous “undead” theories that are ideologically popular but have little basis in fact. They mention the infamous Daryl Bem article. It is pretty much only because Bem’s claims are (presumably) false that they got published in a major research journal. Had the claims been true—that is, had Bem run identical experiments, analyzed his data more carefully and objectively, and reported that the r
Introduction: It all began with this message from Dan Kahan, a law professor who does psychology experiments: My graphs– what do you think?? I guess what do you think of the result too, but the answer is, “That’s obvious!” If it hadn’t been, then it would have been suspicious in my book. Of course, if we had found the opposite result, that would have been “obvious!” too. We are submitting to LR ≠1 Journa l This is the latest study in series looking at relationship between critical reasoning capacities and “cultural cognition” — the tendency of individuals to conform their perceptions of risk & other policy-relevant facts to their group commitments. The first installment was an observational study that found that cultural polarization ( political too ; the distinction relate not to the mechanism for polarization over decision-relevant science but only about how to measure what is hypothesized to be driving it) increases as people become more science literate. This paper and ano
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Introduction: We had a discussion the other day of a paper, “The Economic Effects of Climate Change,” by economist Richard Tol. The paper came to my attention after I saw a notice from Adam Marcus that it was recently revised because of data errors. But after looking at the paper more carefully, I see a bunch of other problems that, to me, make the whole analysis close to useless as it stands. I think this is worth discussing because the paper has been somewhat influential (so far cited 328 times, according to Google Scholar) and has even been cited in the popular press as evidence that “Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century . . . There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today — and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol
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Introduction: A linguist send me an email with the above title and a link to a paper, “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets,” by M. Keith Chen, which begins: Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented e§ects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice. I ran this by another linguist who confirmed the “lunatic fringe” comme
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