Sapir-Whorf Economics: Your Language Predicts Your Future

A Resumption

Apologies for the recent temporary hiatus, been rather busy with that strange thing called real life.  More regular updates from now on but, for a while, they'll be more limited than in the past due to the need to fulfil a book contract.  Still, it’ll be something to add to the Christmas wishlist.

So … let’s look at something really odd, and why, if you’re a useless procrastinator  you should really want to learn German.  It seems that cultural stereotyping may not be quite so irrational as we may have thought …

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Is Self-Interest Self-Fulfilling?

Vicious or Virtuous?

By report and repute our planet has become a less pleasant place over the last hundred years. We’re wealthier and healthier – well, at least in some parts of the world – but this doesn’t seem to have made us any happier. Certainly the world of work is a harsher place, where people are no longer socially attached to their places of employment but a rather viewed as resources to be disposed of as and when required.

One line of argument suggests that this change is not simply due to increased economic pressures on people and corporations to get results but is because managers have learned – been trained – to behave in accordance with the principles of economics, founded on the dubious idea of self-interest. When we act on the basis of ideas these become self-fulfilling. Vicious circle or virtuous ladder?

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The Language of Lucre

Talk the Talk

Once we get past blood-lust, misogyny and an insatiable desire for saturated fat presented in peculiar forms, language is probably the defining feature of humanity. Thus it’s unsurprising that some psychologists think that human behavior is defined by language, rather than through some cognitive super-controller that oversees our every action.

Discursive psychology, the study of how language impacts human behaviour, would expect to see investors swayed by use of language in a way that more rationalist theories would not. Language deployed by the financial media might, for instance, be employed to promote buying or selling of stocks regardless of their fundamental attractions or otherwise. Which, of course, is a stupid idea and therefore, inevitably, looks like it’s probably correct.

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