David Singh Grewal, an Eliot Fellow in the Social Sciences at Harvard University, is author of the book Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, in which he explores, among other topics, the relationship between language, networks, and globalization.
In the wake of the recent quorum we ran on this very subject, David has agreed to guest blog here. We are pleased to have him.
How Networking Influences What We Speak
A Guest Post by David Grewal
Anyone who’s read the Nobellist Thomas Schelling‘s classic The Strategy of Conflict will remember his example of Grand Central Station.
Schelling asked what he called an “unscientific sample of respondents” where they would go to meet a lost friend in New York City, without having specified a place in advance and without any way to communicate. A large majority said they’d go to wait at the clock tower in the middle of Grand Central Station — and they added overwhelmingly that they’d do so at exactly twelve noon. Schelling used this and similar examples to illustrate the logic of what he called “tacit coordination” — the way in which we rely on even entirely arbitrary conventions to coordinate our activities with others in the absence of explicit prior agreement.
Schelling’s work got me thinking about other examples of tacit coordination. I began to wonder whether the same logic of meeting up with a lost friend by choosing a prominent landmark couldn’t explain a lot of what we now call “globalization,” especially if you think about what economists call “network effects.”
Take a more complex version of figuring out a rendezvous point without having specified the details in advance: the problem of global linguistic coordination, which was the subject of a recent Freakonomics quorum.
If you picked two people at random off the face of the earth and asked them to pick one language in which to communicate with someone they knew nothing about, which language would each person choose? The language they’d pick would depend on a series of “reciprocal expectations” — best guesses not just about which language you suppose the other person speaks but which language he thinks you suppose he will speak — which depends, in turn, on which one you think he thinks you suppose he will speak. And so on, until your head swims.
In today’s globalizing world, the probability is increasing that two random people would choose English for their best chance at unplanned linguistic coordination. And this isn’t merely a thought experiment: it’s being played out, with more information among the parties, in the decisions of hundreds of millions of people now learning English as a second language.
Is what’s true of English true of other “standards” — other social conventions that enable coordination among diverse groups of people? Think about a measurement system. Sure, some people will claim that the metric system is intrinsically better than the Imperial because it’s easier to calculate in a decimal system.
But Britain didn’t switch from Imperial to metric just because the latter is base ten. It did so because of what economists call “network effects.” The value of any given coordinating standard — like a measurement system or a language — is worth more when more other people use it. And Britain’s neighbors and largest trading partners generally do. There are “economies of scale” to being part of the larger network.
Globalization has introduced a new coordination game among literally billions of people. With apologies to Thomas Friedman, the world isn’t flat. But it is networked — and we’re all heading to Grand Central Station after one fashion or another.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
A thinks B thinks A thinks that
that A thinks B thinks that
A thinks
A spekas
B speaks L1 L2 L3
According to your ” Language example”, the issue is only about what B speaks????
Are we not talking about one global mind set? the highest (not the lowest) common denominator?
This definately would be an extraordinary achievement i.e., a meeting of our minds. What an intriguing idea i.e., or should I not say thought.
Dr Grewal,
How do you think speed of communication affects network performance? In the real-world analog that is the Internet, it means almost everything, but usually people talking about network effects cite Metcalf’s law as the prime directive. Metcalf’s law doesn’t take segment speed into account at all (It says network value is proportional to the square of the network participants)
In your example, I see a difference between the days when it took 6 months for message to go from London to Bombay and back and today. And i wonder if we have considered how much of the network value is due to the speed-up (which isn’t going to get effectively faster) and how much is due to increased network membership (which could still improve)
Here’s a true story.
In my student days, I was traveling through Europe. In Florence, a friend learned that I was traveling through Trieste, not a small city, en route to Budapest. Another friend was visiting relatives in Trieste, so in those pre-cellphone days, my Florence friend asked me to deliver a message to the other if I ran across him. Neither of us knew how to locate the recipient, so it was a crazy longshot.
Nevertheless, as I sat for a couple of hours in the Trieste station waiting for my next train, my friend sauntered past. I delivered the message as requested and continued my journey. Tacit indeed!
Hi Freakonomics folks -
So a few quick thoughts come to mind as I’ve read though these comments. I’ll jump in…
First, Chris – yes, you’re absolutely right. The rise of a universal standard is not a permanent thing by any means – and it may end up that we come to coordinate a lot of our activities in Chinese some day. In my book, I try to examine both the rise and fall of universal conventions, and I look at both the nineteenth-century gold standard (a universal monetary convention for about fifty years) and the English language in that light. As for language, however, my bet it still on English as a global second language for some time to come. As Peter Strevens, a late linguist at Cambridge University points out, a fascinating thing about English is that within our lifetimes, there will be more English speakers who learned it as a second language from someone who also learned it as a second language than there will be native speakers. That’s incredible “network power,” and so I suspect it will take a big shift – maybe even bigger than the economic rise of China – to alter that “coordination solution.” I can imagine the collapse of a global standard of communication – and the fragmentation of different versions of English, rise of regional languages, etc. – more easily than the switch from one consolidated global convention to another. But what do you think?
NSK – you’re right that we need to distinguish between “fashion” or fads and network power. The way I try to do that in my book (particularly in the last chapter) is by considering whether some norm or behavior has a functional end. So the guy dressing in a business suit for a meeting (in order to be taken seriously) may be consciously coordinating with others in a way that’s different from the emulation we see in, say, pop culture fads. If that’s right, then the (originally) Western mode of “suit and tie” which we’ve seen spread all over the world may have “network power” in a way that the latest hairstyle does not – which may also help tp explain the pervasiveness and durability of some dress styles. What do you think?
And Raj, I wonder if something like this distinction isn’t also at play in the difference between verbal “tics” like uhhmming and aaahing and the choice of a language to speak. Are these extra little words a way to signal some sort of in-group participation or are they unconscious mimicry that operates (perhaps?) on a different level. I put forward various ideas about this in the book, but I don’t think I came to any firm conclusions. I guess I’m still thinking about this issue too!
Solon, thanks for your kind words. It’s still “Mr.” But that should change soon… Fingers crossed.
Amanda, very interesting – I try to account for some of these things in my broader argument since the details of any particular instance of a standard’s having “network power” may be very complex and context-specific. I like the image of the kids on the bus needing to navigate their route in real time!
Chaitanya – I may not have expressed the situation of “reciprocal” or “convergent” expectations very well in my post. What I was trying to get at is the idea of convergent or joint expectations – where two parties who need to coordinate try to anticipate which possible coordination solution out of many will be the one that they’ll both guess. It’s an interdependent process which some analytic philosophers and economists have thought to lay behind the formation of social conventions where the convention on which people converge – say, driving on the left rather than the right – is otherwise arbitrary. In my book, I try to bring that sort of thinking to bear on the process of globalization.
As for the Lady Who Did Her Math Homework – well, what do you think? Could something like “network effects” considered in the domain of thought lead to a sort of global meeting of the minds? I’m not sure, but I was thinking about ideas of “groupthink” and “epistemic communities” toward the end of the book and wondering whether I could push the idea that far…
Finally, misterb, I try to address a bit the way in which many instances of “network power” may differ from the relatively abstract model of Metcalfe’s Law (which is, roughly, that the power of a network judged by internal connections grows exponentially with new network nodes added). I suspect that for Metcalfe’s Law to hold we have to consider uniform nodes and modes of interaction (or, as in your example, constant speeds of communication, etc.) Where that changes – as in the examples of globalization that I consider – it all gets much messier. And maybe even, I hope, more interesting…
I enjoyed all your comments very much! Keep well, everybody -
David Singh Grewal
http://www.davidgrewal.com
Regarding comment #1. Mandarin is the official language in China, but only 53% of the population speak it. They have a lot of work to do before they start export it.