Comment by rayiner
4 days ago
A confounding factor here is that savings behavior is cultural rooted: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6135367/. Studies show that people within a country can have substantially different savings behaviors, robustly correlated with their origin countries, even among people who are third generation immigrants. It’s a mistake to treat either the U.S. or Singapore as homogenous populations for purposes of this analysis.
I once heard a linguistic explanation for this.
European languages have a future tense, which means people have different ideas of themselves in the present and future. You can even hear this in phrases like "that's a problem for future me."
While Chinese lacks the European styled future tense, ignoring time phrases, auxiliary verbs, etc. So people more clearly conceptualize their present and future selves as the same. Leading to things like increased saving.
This of course is rooted in linguist psychology, a very soft science. But still an interesting idea.
This sounds like the 'Future Time Reference' hypothesis by Keith Chen (2013). It’s indeed a fascinating idea, but it’s essentially an example of Galton’s problem (treating related cultures/languages as independent data points).
What makes this story (scientifically) great is that Chen himself co-authored a follow-up study just two years later [1] to rigorously test his own theory. When they re-analyzed the data using mixed-effects models to control for cultural phylogeny and relatedness, the correlation between grammar and savings pretty much disappeared.
They concluded the original finding was likely a spurious correlation.
It turns out that cultural history drives both the language we speak and our saving habits, rather than the grammar causing the behavior.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Thanks for the follow up. I am always hesitant to believe things that sound too Gladwellian.
dont think this hold much water at all.
75% of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese so based on what you are saying it would be worth comparing SG Chinese to Chinese CN on regret since China has a much less robust safety net.
Both sides see declines when hit with economic shocks
We are talking about material impacts, not culture