That is exactly what Yale economist Keith Chen has put forward aboutChinese and other languages. His thesis is peculiar and bold. Chinese doesnot have a future tense marker along the lines of English’s will. Manylanguages don’t and leave future largely to context. Chen proposes that incountries with languages that don’t mark the future regularly, like China, theabsence of the future marking makes people pay more attention to futurity—and makes them more likely to save money! And pay more attention topreventative health practices and such. To be clear: the idea isn’t that havinga future marker makes you pay more attention to the future, rather, not havingone does.Needless to say, the media loved this, especially with Chen providing thedeeply quantified kind of analysis economists are trained in. Might it be thatquietly, how people’s grammars work has actually had an impact on theircountries’ economies? As weird as that seems, might it be that the truth,however bizarre the notion seems, is in the numbers?No, I’m afraid not. A swell graph of Chen’s allows us to find the actual truth.The dark bars are languages that mark the future pretty religiously, in the waythat an English speaker thinks of as normal: for example, I walk, I walked, Iwill walk. The light bars are the languages where the future is largely left tocontext—which worldwide, is actually quite common.Chen presents the graph as showing that future-marking languages clusteramong the countries with lower savings rates. Already, we see that despitethe statistical fact that countries with future-marking languages save 4.75percent less, the overall picture leans discomfitingly toward a rather scattereddistribution of dark and light bars—some light ones amid the dark, and lots of
dark ones amid the light. The statistics show the reality? Sure—but only ifthe linguistic analysis is solid. And it happens not to be.Chen, although making a diligent effort to consult the grammars, was misledby the fact that ultimately, grammars can be unreliable when it comes toexplaining whether or not a language “marks the future” as regularly asEnglish does. For example, Chen has Russian as a future-marking language.And indeed, you can get that impression from a grammar of Russian thatdevotes itself to telling an English speaker that you express the future bydoing x, y, and z. However, Russian does not have anything you could call afuture marker in the sense of English will or the future tense conjugations youmight recall in French and Spanish.Figure 4.1: OECD Savings Rates, 1985–2010Note: On average, countries that speak strong FTR languages save 4.75%less. t = 2.77, p = 0.009It is part of learning Russian, in fact, to wrap your head around expressingthe future by implying it, through bits of stuff that mean other things. Itwasn’t for nothing that literary critic Edmund Wilson once ventured—possibly having drunk in some Whorfianism—that Russians’ inability to beon time was because Russian doesn’t have a future tense.
Even English is like this to an extent: one says We’re buying the HondaCivic, where we express something we will do in the future with theconstruction called the present progressive. Imagine someone asking, “So,what’s going on about the car you want to buy?” If you respond, “We willbuy the Honda Civic,” you likely learned English last night.In Russian, the future usually piggybacks this way on something else. Thedetails are oppressive and, here, unnecessary, but suffice it to say that whilein English the big distinction is between now, then, and later, in Russian thebig distinction is between “flowing along” and “bang, right then,” whether inthe past, present, or future. The future, in Russian, is largely expressed as oneof various takes on “bang, right then.” So, ja pisal means “I was writing,”that is, flowing along writing. But add na- and say ja na-pisal and it means “Iwrote”—right then. Tell someone to write something (right now) and you sayNa-pishi! In the same way, to say “I will write” you use that same na- bit andsay Na-pishu. The idea is that you are not talking about just writing along,over a period of time—rather, you mean you will start some writing. Rightnow, writing will start.But this means that in Russian, there is no marker you can think of as beingspecifically for expressing the future. Russian offers no table of future tenseendings to learn. A Russian struggles to explain to an English speaker what“the future in Russian” is, typically resorting to just giving examples like na-pishu whose endings, in terms of conjugation, are in the present tense. True,you can use the be verb to say “I’ll be writing”—ja budu pisat’. This is thekind of thing Chen likely came across. But that’s a highly secondary, also-rankind of future—go back to the Honda conversation and imagine some poorsoul saying, “I will be buying the Honda Civic.” Only now and then do youneed to say such things. Overall, to learn Russian as an English speaker is toask, at some point, “How, exactly, do you put a verb in the future?”So that means that on Chen’s chart, the Russian bar should be white. Now, asit happens, if it were white, that would be good for Chen, because Russiansare actually good savers. For him, Russian as a future-marking language issomething he has to classify as “noise,” because his idea is that languagesthat mark the future make their speakers save less money. But this actuallycreates more, not fewer problems
