Saving for a rainy day: Keith Chen on language that forecasts weather — and behavior

How are China, Estonia and Germany different from India, Greece and the UK? To an economist, one answer is obvious: savings rates. Germans save 10 percentage points more than the British do (as a fraction of GDP), while Estonians and Chinese save a whopping 20 percentage points more than Greeks and Indians. Economists think a lot about what drives people to save, but many of these international differences remain unexplained. In a recent paper of mine, I find that these countries differ not only in how much their residents save for the future, but also how their native speakers talk about the future.

In late 2011, an idea struck me while reading several papers in psychology that link a person’s language with differences in how they think about space, color, and movement. As a behavioral economist, I am interested in understanding how people make decisions. Could a person’s language subtly affect his or her everyday decisions? In particular, could the way a person’s language marks the future affect their propensity to save for the future?

In a nutshell, this is precisely what I found. After scouring many datasets with millions of records on individual household savings behavior—along with a number of peculiar health performance metrics like grip strength and walking speed—I find that languages that oblige speakers to grammatically separate the future from the present lead them to invest less in the future. Speakers of such languages save less, retire with less wealth, smoke more, practice more unsafe sex and are more obese. Surprisingly, this effect persists even after controlling for a speaker’s education, income, family structure and religion.

Back when my first paper on this topic circulated, many linguists were appropriately skeptical of the work. Their concerns are concisely explained in two well-thought out posts (here and here) by the linguists Mark Liberman and Goeffrey Pullum on the blog they founded, Language Log. Mark and Geoffrey also invited me to write a guest post explaining the work. In that post, I discuss which of their possible concerns are unlikely given the patterns I find across the world in people’s savings and health behaviors, and also try to clarify which of their concerns I was not yet able to address.

This exchange prompted a broad set of discussions as to what different types of data, analyses and experiments could, in principle, answer the questions raised by the patterns I find. Cross-disciplinary discussions took place in a subsequent post by Julie Sedivy and followup posts by Mark Liberman, and also at the Linguistic Data Consortium’s 20th Anniversary Workshop. Several new avenues of investigation and work came out of these interactions, three of which are now ongoing projects.

One new idea that I’ve begun to explore entails measuring a language’s time reference by scraping the web—to search for natural patterns in language—in addition to using linguistic classifications. This led me to search the web for the simplest form of writing about the future I could find: weather forecasts. Why weather forecasts? Well, forecasts rarely talk about the past, so they’re a natural place to look for speech about the future. Weather forecasters also generally communicate in natural, straightforward language, and often convey similar content across different settings. Can patterns in weather forecasts measure how languages structure the future, and can these differences predict how people save for the future? Amazingly, they do.

A team of linguistics and economics students assisted with this analysis, and managed to scrape the web for weather forecasts in 39 languages from around the world. The figure below summarizes what we found: wide variation in how often, when talking about future weather, forecasts in a particular language grammatically mark the future as something distinct from the present. In English, for example, this comes down to the relative frequency of sentences like:

Rain is likely this weekend.                (present tense “is”)
It will likely rain this weekend.          (future tense “will rain”)

What’s surprising is that when I repeat the statistical analysis I did in the paper, I find an incredibly strong relationship between how forecasters talk about weather and how much people choose to save.  Essentially, a 20 percentage point increase in the frequency of future tenses results in 1% more of GDP saved. This finding holds even after taking into account a country’s level of development, rate of growth, demographics, social security protections and major religions.

What does this mean? I don’t believe it demonstrates extreme weather forecaster persuasion. Rather, I think it shows that many different ways of measuring how languages mark time share a strong and striking relationship with how speakers of those languages save. In short, I believe more than ever that the data suggests a strong and robust relationship between linguistic and economic data, a relationship that leaves us at an exciting crossroads: one where economists have a tremendous amount to learn from linguists.
The figure below measures the percent of time weather forecasts use future vs. present tenses (download a larger version as a PDF). See the paper here for details.

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Mikko Hypponen: Three types of online attack

Cybercrime expert Mikko Hypponen talks us through three types of online attack on our privacy and data -- and only two are considered crimes.

Clay Shirky: Sopa and Pipa would create a consumption-only internet

'Sites will be forced to spy on their users, all the time, to make sure you are not talking about sites media firms in the US do not want you to talk about.

You may not care about the US bills aimed at censoring the net but you should – they could stop you participating online again

There are many reasons to dislike Sopa and Pipa, the pair of internet censorship bills working their way through the US Congress. They are (another) example of the influence of corporate money on American politics: US media firms have cumulatively donated tens of millions of dollars to the bills' authors. They are (another) example of representatives refusal to represent the public: they tried to rush the bills through at the end of last year, with no public consultation. And the proposed technical solution – censorship enforced through the domain name system – would not have the effect they want it to have, but its technical side-effects would break important parts of the internet.

But maybe you don't care about all of that. Maybe politics bores you, maybe technical details make your eyes glaze over. Here's why you should care anyway: the proposed law that would result from Sopa and Pipa will only work if you are put under 24-hour digital surveillance.

The old media firms in the US aren't out to get you personally, of course – they don't really care about you in particular. What they dislike about you is your willingness to share things with your friends, and with the world at large. Sopa/Pipa would allow private companies to assert that a foreign site is "dedicated to theft of US property". Once a US media firm had made such an accusation, they could then black out the domain name of the accused site, so that if a user typed ReallyEvil.co.uk into their browser, nothing would happen (all of this could be based on an accusation: Sopa and Pipa seem to regard the niceties of a trial as an undue burden).

The proposed blackout wouldn't remove the site itself from the internet, of course, it would just make the domain name inert. This is where Sopa and Pipa really get scary. They don't just propose making US media firms into judge, jury and executioner, they propose forcing every site on the internet to pitch in on the proposed censorship and, critically, they imagine punishing not just the original sites but anyone else who doesn't censor them well enough.

The scary bit of legalese here is the idea that the law would apply not just to actual copyright violations (the nominal goal of the law) but to any site that was "facilitating the activities" of copyright infringement, a term nowhere defined but vague enough to include mentioning the existence of such sites, which is enough to make them findable. Like a fast-spreading virus, the proposed censorship moves outwards from the domain name system, to include any source of public web content in the US.

If the phrase "any source of public web content" seems like a dry detail, substitute the name of your favourite web publisher: you. The US is, for the moment at least, the world's premier host of sites that support user-generated material – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia, Reddit, on and on. And under the proposed law, every one of those sites would have to take steps to prevent publishers, which is to say people, which is to say you, from helping anyone find out about the existence of sites the US media firms don't like. And since the law doesn't require a private company to provide any advance notice before the blacklisting, these sites will be forced to spy on their users, in advance and all the time, to make sure you are not talking about sites media firms in the US do not want you to talk about, even if you are not a US citizen.

Sopa and Pipa are, quite simply, an attempt to create a privatised form of international censorship, and because the censorship would have to be nearly total to be effective, they would have a profound and chilling effect on any form of public conversation among ordinary citizens. It would render the internet a place where the only content to be seen or heard or read is produced by professionals, with the rest of use relegated to the role of pure consumption.

As Congress continues to push the bills through, this side-effect of a "consumption-only" internet is starting to look like the goal of the bills in the first place.


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Clay Shirky: Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.

 Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches a course named “Social Weather.” He’s the author of Here Comes Everybody, about the power of crowds, and the brand-new Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Sonaar Luthra: Meet the Water Canary

After a crisis, how can we tell if water is safe to drink? Current tests are slow and complex, and the delay can be deadly, as in the cholera outbreak after Haiti's earthquake in 2010. TED Fellow 

Sonaar Luthra previews his design for a simple tool that quickly tests water for safety -- the Water Canary. He is the creator of Water Canary, a water-testing device that collects real-time water-quality data from the field.

He  was a writer and educator when he enrolled in NYU's famed  Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) -- a breeding ground for cross-disciplinary thinking. He tells the TED Blog what happened next:

"I wanted to come up with some way of becoming what I was calling an 'urban planner for the global village.' And ... I fell in love with circuitry and with making tangible objects that had real functionality. Next thing I knew, I found myself in a class called Design for UNICEF, taught by Clay Shirky in association with UNICEF’s Innovations Lab.