THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Econo-linguism: The correlation between language and wealth

Econo-linguism: The correlation between language and wealth

I personally am rather interested in foreign languages. I have minor qualifications in three of them. But I don't think it is clear that anybody is rich BECAUSE he speaks another language. I think it is more likely that a third factor (such as IQ) is at work: i.e. rich people are the sort of people who are likely to speak another language.

And in any case, the findings below are slim warrant for teaching or studying another language in High School. A much better case could be made to teach another languge in the grade-school years -- when another language is most easily acquired

Do people who speak more than one language earn more money?
When Forbes released its World Billionaire List for 2022, it became apparent that a pattern could be detected: many of the billionaires were able to speak a second language. In fact, we were able to determine that a staggering 32% of the richest people in the world can speak another language.

Establishing this was achieved by focusing on the languages that these billionaires speak, as some seemed to be more popular than others – but why is this? Are some languages more useful when it comes to being financially successful than others? Do job roles asking for bilingual people tend to pay more than those that don’t?

To answer these burning questions, we analysed whether there was a connection between the languages spoken by the richest people in the world and their wealth, as well as utilising Numbeo and The World Happiness Index to see if richer, ‘happier’ countries came with languages deemed useful in the workplace.

We then focused on the top-paying jobs on LinkedIn and Glassdoor to establish whether particular languages are requested for specific job titles, as well as whether they come with healthier salaries. After all of this, we were truly able to determine whether it pays to know a second language.

Do the richest people on the planet speak more than one language?

Unsurprisingly, at the top of the list sits Tesla mogul Elon Musk, with a net worth of a staggering $219,000,000,000 (£181bn). However, despite regularly being the wealthiest person on earth, Elon does not speak a second language. Third on the list was Benard Arnault, chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton SE who is worth a whopping $158,000,000,000 (£130bn).

His first language is French, but he can also speak English, German and Italian. With Germany sitting as the third richest country in the world and the UK ranking fifth on the same list, it is not surprising that the billionaire opted to learn these languages. As Italy is hailed as a country that is rich in culture, art and history, learning the native language also makes a lot of sense for the investor and art collector.

Third on the list is Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, with a net worth of $107,000,000,000 (£88bn). While English is his first language, the entrepreneur also speaks Russian. Steve Ballmer, 10th on the rich list, is worth $91,400,000,000 (£75bn) and speaks French as well as his first language, English. A recent article detailed that a speech done entirely in French by the Internet giant left Finance Minister Christine Lagarde ‘impressed’, along with a permanent legal residency in France.

32% of the world’s richest people speak a second language
Mukesh Ambani, director of Reliance Industries Ltd and worth $90,700,000,000 (£75.2bn), comes in at 11th on the list. With Gujarati as his first language, the billionaire has managed to forge immense success – unsurprising as this dialect is spoken by over 46 million people, across India, the United States and the UK. As his second language, he also speaks English.

Michael Bloomberg, 13th on the list and worth $82,000,000,000 (£68bn), speaks English as his first language and Spanish as his second. Our data revealed that the top languages spoken by billionaires on this list were Chinese, French and Spanish – which is unsurprising, as China is the third largest country in the world. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook and worth $67,300,000,000 (£55.8bn) speaks Chinese as his second language. With so many financial possibilities in this country, it is obvious that billionaires would want to be able to make deals there as efficiently as possible.

https://preply.com/en/blog/econo-linguism-the-correlation-between-language-and-wealth/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

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Econo-linguism: The correlation between language and wealth

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