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Russia awards SMU’s Weber $3 million for research lab to study diversity, social interactions

Grant will establish first-of-its-kind research laboratory at Moscow’s New Economic School to focus on many types of societal diversity

Kremlin wall and Moskva river in early morning

A $3 million grant to SMU economics professor Shlomo Weber will fund the establishment of a first-of-its-kind research laboratory to study diversity and social interactions.

The new center at Moscow’s New Economic School will focus on research into the many different types of societal diversity, including economic, historical, geographical, linguistic and ethnic. Researchers at the center will assess the impact of societal diversity on economic, political and social development, said Weber, who is the Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Trustee Professor of Economics in the SMU Department of Economics.

Weber is a PINE Foundation Visiting Professor of Economics at the New Economic School, where President Obama delivered the 2009 commencement address and declared a reset on Russian-American relations.

“This kind of support is quite unique in the world,” he said. “Our team of Russian and foreign scholars will do their best to contribute to the study of Russia’s social and economic development in the past, present and future.”

Grant supports theoretical and empirical aspects of research into diversity
Ranked the best economics institution in the former communist countries, NES is a private graduate school in economics. Its mission is to benefit Russia’s private and public sectors through excellence in economics education and research. Faculty-in-residence include economists with doctoral degrees in economics and finance from the world’s leading universities.

Members of the SMU economics faculty will have a chance to participate in research at the laboratory, especially in studies of social and trade networks and development, Weber said. SMU economics doctoral students will have opportunities for internships.

Every year, 15 to 20 graduates of the NES Master’s program join the top doctoral economics programs in the United States. Many leading economics and finance departments have NES alumni on their faculty. SMU Assistant Professor Anna Kormlitzina, in SMU’s Department of Economics, is a graduate of NES.

“The award of this grant is remarkable evidence of NES’s progress over the 20 years of its existence,” Weber said. “I’m grateful to the government of the Russian Federation for the decision to support theoretical and empirical aspects of diversity and social interactions, focused but not limited to Russian economy and society.”

Research will examine how diversity impacts social interactions, trust, emergence of social networks
The grant is part of an annual program by the Russian Federation that supports research supervised by the world’s leading scholars. Weber was one of 700 applicants, 42 of whom were awarded funding.

The research will be conducted on theoretical, empirical and experimental grounds and will examine how diversity impacts social interactions, trust and emergence of various types of social networks and on the quality and functioning of public and private institutions.

Weber’s grant was the only one awarded within the discipline of “Economics and Business.” Grants were awarded on the basis of the scientist’s scientific achievements, research experience and research prospects of the project; sponsoring organization; and leadership potential of the research laboratory being established.

The grant carries a possible two-year extension. Winners of the competition personally lead the laboratory for a minimum of four months each calendar year.

Grant will bring together the world’s leading scholars on diversity
“This grant will help to bring together the world’s leading scholars, including Nobel winners Robet Aumann, from Hebrew University, and Eric Maskin, from Harvard, and leading authorities in their respective fields — Stephen Durlauf, Wisconsin, and Matt Jackson, Stanford — as well as young scholars and students,” Weber said. “The decision to award this grant recognizes the success of NES in implementing its mission to benefit Russia’s private and public sectors through excellence in economics education and research. It also provides support for further development of the school’s research capacity.”

Weber’s expertise includes consulting in Eastern and Western Europe and in Central and Southeast Asia. He currently coordinates an Open Society Institute development project at the National University of Mongolia.

Weber’s recent book, with economist Victor Ginsburgh, “How Many Languages Do We Need? Economics of Linguistic Diversity” (2011, Princeton University Press), will be followed later this year by a volume edited with economist Michael Alexeev, “The Oxford Handbook of Russian Economy.”

Weber earned his doctoral degree in mathematical economics from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Moscow State University.

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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UPI: Study looks at how language excludes many in EU

UPI and other media outlets have covered the research of SMU economist Shlomo Weber.

In the new book “How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity” (Princeton University Press), Weber and his co-author, Victor Ginsburgh, explain their research to understand the costs and benefits of the many languages across the globe.

Weber is the Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Trustee Professor of Economics at SMU and director of the Richard Johnson Center for Economic Studies at SMU. He is also a PINE Foundation professor of economics at the New Economic School, Moscow.

Weber’s main area of research is game theory and its applications to public finance, political economy and international trade. Weber has consulted on numerous projects for private businesses, international organizations and governments in Asia, North America, Western and Eastern Europe.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

DALLAS, UPI — A majority of European Union citizens are marginalized because they do not speak English, the language most EU official business is conducted in, a study says.

Shlomo Weber of Southern Methodist University in Dallas and Victor Ginsburgh of the Free University of Brussels say that for the EU’s non-English speakers, their native languages are of limited use in the union’s political, legal, communal and business spheres.

That means they have limited access to EU laws, rules, regulations and debates in the governing body, they said.

“Language is the proxy for engagement. People identify strongly with their language, which is integral to culture and traditions,” Weber said in an SMU release Tuesday. “Language is so explosive; language is so close to how you feel.”

Previous studies have found 90 percent of the EU’s official documents are drafted in English and later translated to other languages, mostly French and sometimes German.

Read the full story.

Other coverage:

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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Vast majority of European Union citizens are marginalized by dominance of English language

The European Union has 27 member countries and 23 official languages, but its official business is carried out primarily in one language — English. Yet the striking findings of a new study show that barely a third of the EU’s 500 million citizens speak English.

What about the other two-thirds? They are linguistically disenfranchised, say the study’s authors.

For the EU’s non-English speakers, their native languages are of limited use in the EU’s political, legal, communal and business spheres, conclude economists Shlomo Weber, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and Victor Ginsburgh, Free University of Brussels (ULB), the authors who conducted the study. Those who are disenfranchised have limited access to EU laws, rules, regulations and debates in the governing body — all of which may violate the basic principles of EU society, the researchers say.

“Language is the proxy for engagement. People identify strongly with their language, which is integral to culture and traditions,” Weber says. “Language is so explosive; language is so close to how you feel.”

Weber and Ginsburgh base their findings on a new methodology they developed to quantitatively evaluate both costs and benefits of government policies to either expand or reduce diversity. The method unifies previous approaches to measure language diversity’s impact, an area of growing interest to scholars of economics and other social sciences.

“With globalization, people feel like they’ve been left on the side of the road. If your culture, your rights, your past haven’t been respected, how can you feel like a full member of society?” says Weber. “It is a delicate balance. People must decide if they want to trade their languages to increase by a few percentage points the rate of economic growth.”

Methodology can be applied to language diversity in other nations, including the United States
Beyond the EU, the Weber-Ginsburgh methodology can evaluate linguistic policies in other nations, too, including the U.S. It builds on a body of earlier published research by Weber, Ginsburgh and other economists.

“Our analysis offers a formal framework by which to address the merits and costs of the vast number of languages spoken in various countries,” said Weber. “We formally measure linguistic similarities and subsequently the linguistic distances between groups who speak various languages.”

The methodology also can measure the impact of other kinds of diversity, whether animal and plant biodiversity or economic classes of people, say the study’s authors.

They report their findings and present the methodology in their new book, “How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity” (Princeton University Press). The research is noted on the web site of the International Monetary Fund in a review by Henry Hitchings.

Quantitative analysis finds English is the language spoken by largest percentage of EU citizens
Previous researchers found that 90 percent of the EU’s official documents are drafted in English and later translated to other languages, often French and sometimes German. Previous research also has documented frustration among EU officials with the political entity’s multitude of languages, as members wonder whether they are being understood.

Against that backdrop, the Weber-Ginsburgh analysis of the EU used official data from a routinely conducted EU survey of member states carried out in 2005 and later. The data came from answers to questions that included: What is your mother tongue? Which languages are you conversant in? How do you rate your fluency on a scale of very good, good or basic?

Weber and Ginsburgh found that of all the languages, English embraces the most EU citizens, followed by German second and French third.

English, German and French fall short
Yet those languages fall far short of including all people. The economists found that many EU residents are excluded.

Nearly two-thirds of EU citizens — 63 percent — don’t speak or understand English, while 75 percent don’t readily speak or understand German, and 80 percent don’t speak or understand French.

“English is spoken almost everywhere around the world,” the authors write, “but it is still far from being spoken by almost everyone.” At the same time, many non-native speakers of English feel the onslaught of that language’s global domination, a phenomenon that wasn’t generally foreseen and that evolved only within the last 60 years.

Weber and Ginsburgh discovered one EU age group that is less marginalized by English than other groups — youth ages 15 to 29. Fewer than half the young people — 43 percent — are disenfranchised, the researchers found.

The economists also introduce the concept of “proximity” — the degree to which languages are similar to one another. People who speak similar languages are less disenfranchised from one another, they say. Similarity is a factor of pronunciation, phonetics, syntax, grammar and vocabulary, although the authors caution that even words that seem alike aren’t always related, but instead are merely similar by chance or because languages borrow words.

Language represents identity and culture
Among the world’s 271 nations, more than 6,900 languages are spoken, Weber and Ginsburgh say.

Their research has found that there is no optimal degree of language diversity for a society, but many examples throughout history demonstrate that too much linguistic diversity is expensive, detrimental and often divisive, they say.

“The story of post-colonial Africa — what’s been called Africa’s growth tragedy — offers a painful example of the heavy costs incurred by a multitude of linguistic and ethnic divisions,” Weber says.

Language and cultural differences frequently have played a role in war, underdevelopment, brutal changes of power, poor administration, corruption and slacking economic growth, say the authors. Linguistic divides also impose friction on trade between countries, as well as influence migratory flows, literary translations or votes cast in various contests.

For example, in Sri Lanka two linguistic groups fought a bloody civil war for 25 years, killing tens of thousands of people, note Weber and Ginsburgh.

More recently, the former Belgian Prime Minister became infuriated at a position taken by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and decided to vent his ire by hurling the supreme insult: Refusing to speak English when addressing the official EU body, and opting instead for his native Flemish.

Designating an official language must weigh costs, benefits
Can the EU ever mandate an official language that embraces its 500 million citizens? How can Nigeria manage 527 languages spoken by citizens of that country? Or Cameroon, with its 279? How does democracy function in India, where 30 languages thrive among more than 1 billion native speakers?

About one-third of the world’s nations have met these challenges by legislating official language provisions in their constitutions, the authors say. The official language typically applies to official documents, communication between institutions and citizens and debates in official bodies.

But to scientifically determine an optimal set of core languages, the authors say, nations must weigh the costs of linguistic disenfranchisement against the benefits of standardization.

“History provides many examples of political regimes that have mandated single languages for efficiency or social control reasons, many of which have proved unsustainable in the face of backlash from those disenfranchised linguistically,” Weber says. “At the other end of the spectrum, other countries have permitted, by default or design, linguistic anarchy in which dozens or even hundreds of languages exist — to the detriment of even basic efficiency. ‘How Many Languages Do We Need?’ provides a common-sense argument and quantitative methodology to evaluate both criteria for languages: efficiency and enfranchisement, which are indispensable for sustainable globalization in our fractionalized world.”


France: An example of linguistic diversity handled well
Over the course of human history, has any country handled their linguistic diversity well?

“France,” Weber says. “Two hundred years ago, France had a lot of dialects, and only 3 million of its 28 million people spoke French. That’s only 10 percent of the people. In a bloodless transition the government imposed French as the official language but allowed dialects to flourish.”

Weber is the Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Trustee Professor of Economics at SMU. He is also a PINE Foundation professor of economics at the New Economic School, Moscow.

Ginsburgh is professor of economics emeritus at ULB, member of the European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics in Brussels, and a member of the Center of Operations research and Econometrics, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. — Margaret Allen

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics Researcher news SMU In The News

International Monetary Fund: A review of “How Many Languages Do We Need?”

Renowned non-fiction author Henry Hitchings covers SMU economist Shlomo Weber‘s new book “How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity” (Princeton University Press).

Writing for the International Monetary Fund, Hitchings’ review “Speaking in Tongues” notes that Weber and his co-author, Victor Ginsburgh, have scrupulously researched the costs and benefits of the many languages across the globe. Hitchings, the author of “The Language Wars” and “The Secret Life of Words” among other books, notes that the books most thought-provoking section is the case study of linguistic policy in the European Union.

Hitchings, whose focus is language and cultural history, summarizes the message of the book: “Reform of the European Union’s linguistic workings calls for collaboration, which touches on a fundamental issue of the book: the vexed question of what the ‘we’ in the book’s title really means. It is a pronoun that implies togetherness. It is an appeal for community. But it evokes widely differing solidarities, bonds, and priorities. In any debate about language (or politics), ‘we’ is hard to come by, as this book makes very clear.”

Weber is the Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Trustee Professor of Economics at SMU and director of the Richard Johnson Center for Economic Studies at SMU. He is also a PINE Foundation professor of economics at the New Economic School, Moscow.

Weber’s main area of research is game theory and its applications to public finance, political economy and international trade. Weber has consulted on numerous projects for private businesses, international organizations and governments in Asia, North America, Western and Eastern Europe.

Read the full review (Scroll down).

EXCERPT:

Speaking in Tongues
By Henry Hitchings

In this scrupulously researched study, Belgian economist Victor Ginsburgh, whose native language is Swahili, and game theorist Shlomo Weber, a Canadian citizen who is a native Russian speaker, assess the costs and benefits of the vast number of languages currently in use across the globe.

It is commonly assumed that a reduction in the number of languages improves efficiency. Although no one knows the exact number of living languages, the figure is astonishingly large—a sensible estimate would be 6,000–7,000. But half the world’s population has one out of a mere eleven of these as a first language.

Most developed economies are in countries where a single language predominates; in countries where there is great linguistic diversity there tends also to be much bureaucracy and wastefulness. The nonprofit SIL International, which maintains a database of the world’s languages, reports that 278 are currently used in Cameroon; the figures for Chad, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea are, respectively, 131, 514, and 830. It is easy to see how this kind of linguistic multiplicity might impede economic development—for instance, by hampering geographical and social mobility and by obstructing many citizens’ access to key legal services.

Utopian thinkers have long imagined that technology and political planning will one day end civilization’s linguistic tension and confusion. Today there is support for the idea of establishing English as the global lingua franca. Indeed, many believe it already is. Yet the dominance of one language leads to the erosion of others—potentially a catastrophe for the world’s linguistic and cultural ecosystem. Ginsburgh and Weber quote the playwright Ariel Dorfman, born in Chile but now a U.S. citizen: “The ascendancy of English, like so many phenomena associated with globalization, leaves too many invisible losers, too many people silenced.”

Ginsburgh and Weber often write in a highly technical fashion, scrutinizing such matters as cladistic distance, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, and dichotomous disenfranchisement indices. Yet this analysis is presented crisply, and there are plenty of well-chosen snippets from commentators including Mario Vargas Llosa and Amartya Sen. The discussion embraces not only the costs of translation and Joseph Greenberg’s classic attempts to quantify diversity, but also the quirks of Finnish private investors and the Eurovision Song Contest.

Read the full review (Scroll down).

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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A mathematical model determines which nations are more stable and which are more likely to break up

Thanks to a new model created by an international research group it is now possible to predict which European countries are more likely to become united or which are more likely to break up. It does so by not only considering demographic and economic criteria but, most ingeniously of all, culture and genetics.

Southern Methodist University economist Shlomo Weber was a member of the team and co-author of the study that was published in the Journal of Economic Growth.

The scientists said their method quantitatively analyzes the stability and disintegration of European nations. It also estimates the implicit benefits of a larger European Union or, in other words, what would happen if the EU were one country. They also give empirical support for the use of genetics as an indicator of cultural heterogeneity amongst nations.

Besides Weber, other researchers included scientists from the Carlos III University of Madrid, the Toulouse School of Economics in France and the New Moscow School of Economics in Russia.

It has always been common knowledge that the more nations that join together in unity, the greater the profits, said Ignacio Ortuño Ortín, a researcher at the University of Madrid. This is because the market gets bigger and costs are shared. On the other hand, when many regions or countries are brought together there is a difference in populations, both economically and culturally. This, in turn, implies a high cost. There was a need for methodology that quantitatively analyzes these two aspects using specific cases.

Case study: Yugoslavia’s economic, cultural differences played role in instability
The mathematical model the researchers put forward includes factors such as a country’s wealth alongside size and cultural differences in terms of population genetics. According to the experts, the most difficult aspect to quantify when making predictions is the “measurement” of countries from a cultural point of view. “We take population genetics data and then use it to support the fact that such genetic distance between regions can be used as a good tool when approaching cultural distance,” Ortuño said.

According to the scientists, this does not suggest that genetics explains culture but that there is a correlation between the two. This means that populations that have intermixed more will also display greater cultural similarity. “We are not saying that genes explain the way a person thinks,” clarifies Ortuño.

In order to put consistency of their model to the test, a real-life case was chosen: the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The authors of the study found that the economic differences between its republics determined the order of disintegration – a fact that coincided with their model. Likewise, cultural differences, although small, played a key role in triggering instability.

Predictions for other countries
The model’s first theoretical predictions were made by pairing two countries based on the hypothetical situation of Europe being a single country and on the regions that are more prone to separate from their current nation.

If the European Union were to become stronger and had a common fiscal as well as monetary policy (both of which together would turn it into a single country), in the long run, Greece and Portugal would benefit the most. In terms of percentages, Portugal would benefit from an increase in wealth of 13 percent, Greece would see an increase of 11.9 percent, Ireland with 8.9 percent and Finland with 8 percent. Spain would see a growth of 4.1 percent whereas those countries that would benefit least would be Germany, followed by Italy and then France.

The researchers have also predicted what regions have more incentives to separate from the nations to which they belong. “We are not suggesting that it would be beneficial for these regions to separate but it is true that, in relative terms, the Basque Country and Scotland have more incentives,” they claim.

According to the model, those that are more inclined to pair up would be Austria and Switzerland, Denmark and Norway, and France and Great Britain. Spain would be more interested in uniting with France but “this does not necessarily mean that France would be interested in uniting with Spain,” says Ortuño. He adds that “we avoid taking the strategic decisions of countries into account. This means that our model predicts how much a country would benefit if a union were to occur.”

The team is currently working on a new project with collaborators in Moscow who are applying the same method to understand the stability of regions in Russia. — Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.