In what ways does language shape our understanding of money and the Essay

In what ways does language shape our understanding of money and the economy - Essay Example When people speak about the future, they speak as if the future is more distinct from the past and feels distant. People get less motivated to save their money now in favor of the comfort of monetary value in future years (Holmes, 2009). Speaking a language that has no obligatory future markers such as Mandarin tend to stimulates people to accumulate more retirement assets. The national savings rates of a country are adversely affected by language. A country with smaller proportion of people speaking languages that does not have obligatory future markers tend to increases the rates of national savings. Evidence from research suggests that a person’s vernacular shapes the way he or she thinks about the various aspects of the real world, space and time. This has broad implications in the spheres of economics, politics and law (Reed 2009). Language structure affects our judgments and decisions concerning the future and this may have remarkable long-term consequences. From an economic point of view, people’s rates of savings are affected by various factors such as their income, age, education level, religious affiliation, their cultural values and their countries’ legal systems. Even though after all those factors were accounted for, language effect on the people’s savings rates turned out to be tremendous. Spoken language like English has obligatory future markers making people about 30 percent less likely to save money for the future use. People often counter certain economic policies as they disapprove on moral grounds of the assumptions on which they think the policies rest but not because they have been or would be economically hurt by such policies without even carefully calculating views about their economic worth (Reed 2009). There are over 7,000 languages spoken all over the world, which exhibit tremendous variance. Research has shown that language from verb tenses to gender to metaphors usually