Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Which European language to study?

Second, Albert Saiz, the MIT economist who calculated the 2% premium, found quite different premiums for different languages: just 1.5% for Spanish, 2.3% for French and 3.8% for German. This translates into big differences in the language account: your Spanish is worth $51,000, but French, $77,000, and German, $128,000. Humans are famously bad at weighting the future against the present, but if you dangled even a post-dated $128,000 cheque in front of the average 14-year-old, Goethe and Schiller would be hotter than Facebook.

Why do the languages offer such different returns? It has nothing to do with the inherent qualities of Spanish, of course. The obvious answer is the interplay of supply and demand. This chart reckons that Spanish-speakers account for a bit more of world GDP than German-speakers do. But an important factor is economic openness. Germany is a trade powerhouse, so its language will be more economically valuable for an outsider than the language of a relatively more closed economy.

But in American context (the one Mr Saiz studied), the more important factor is probably supply, not demand, of speakers of a given language. Non-Latino Americans might study Spanish because they hear and see so much of it spoken in their country. But that might be the best reason not to study the language, from a purely economic point of view. A non-native learner of Spanish will have a hard time competing with a fluent native bilingual for a job requiring both languages. Indeed, Mr Saiz found worse returns for Spanish study in states with a larger share of Hispanics. Better to learn a language in high demand, but short supply—one reason, no doubt, ambitious American parents are steering their children towards Mandarin. The drop-off in recent years in the American study of German might be another reason for young people to hit the Bücher.

Goethe and Schiller would be hotter than Facebook

learning German boosts earnings more than learning French or Spanish

This may be true overall, but it doesn't take into account how language will affect earnings by field. They averaged everything together. In the world of finance or international trade, German might boost your earnings. But if you want to go into anything human-services related, Spanish (in the U.S.) will make you a much more desirable hire, while German will get you squat.

The paper attempted to control for this, but failed in two ways. First (and less serious), they used college major as a proxy for career choice, which is a very inaccurate measure. Second and more important, they merely used that information to adjust the statistics to eliminate it as a source of bias in their results, but they still were lumping everyone together. When you average everyone together, German is buying somebody enough more that it pulls the whole statistic in favor of German.

Instead, they should have been looking by career category. (In the language of my biz, they should have been looking for simple effects instead of a main effect, because there are probably some serious cross-over interactions going on here.)

TL;DR -- If you want to practice medicine in New Mexico, take Spanish not German.

Broad studies are useless in determining individual outcomes.

You are harshing my mellow here.