The Language of Inequality

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Andrea Brandolini:



Like Brad DeLong, I don’t really know why we’d be so casually dismissive of the idea that master class labor mobility inside the Anglosophere is in fact much greater than mobility across the linguistic divide. Now it’s true that this lack of mobility seems somewhat irrational. Firms interested in reducing labor costs could realize substantial gains by importing low-paid Asian CEOs but in practice corporate nationality makes a big difference when it comes to staffing the board of directors and the executive suite.

At any rate, you could probably try to test this. In some European countries they subtitle the American TV shows and in others they dub them. The quality of the English spoken in the dubbed countries is noticeably lower than that spoken in the subtitle countries. Are people form subtitle countries more likely to relocate to Anglosphere countries than people from dub countries? When Carl-Henrik Svanberg was CEO of Ericsson in Sweden, he earned 15.75 million SEK. Wikipedia says his compensation as BP’s chairman is much higher than that. And like most Swedes, he speaks English very well. Nonetheless, he did manage to create a PR fiasco by talking about “small people” instead of “the little guy.”