Vilket/vilka språk? kommer att vara eftertraktade på arbetsmarknaden?

DUBNER: Saiz is from Barcelona – Barthelona – and he’s an economist at MIT, where he teaches urban planning. On today’s show we’re asking about the return on investment of learning a foreign language and, wouldn’t you know it, Saiz has calculated exactly that. He tracked about 9,000 college graduates to see how a foreign language affected their wages.He was surprised by what he found.

SAIZ: Yeah, unfortunately, and I have to say, of course, because I try to speak three, I was pretty disappointed, and actually we found a very, very small return. What we did find is that after controlling for a host of characteristics, and using, a lot of experimental research designs that are basically trying to compare people who are identical for everything except for the second language, we did tend to find a premium in the labor market of about 2 percent of wages. In other words, if you speak a second language, you can expect to earn, on average, and that’s across many, many different people, on average you can be expected to earn about 2 percent higher wages. To contextualize this, think about your income or your wage being about $30,000, then you would expect to earn about $600 more per year.

DUBNER: Now that’s not nothing. There are a lot of things you can do that won’t increase your earnings by even 2 percent. But still, that’s not a huge premium. And, I hate to tell this to our young Spanish speakers back at the Little Red School House in New York but there is a rank order in terms of how different foreign languages translate into higher earnings.

SAIZ: We know that the lowest return is Spanish, where you get about 1.5 percent, and then French 2.7 percent, and then German 4 percent. So you know learning a second language is something that’s worth to do by itself, but as a financial decision, probably, if you’re focusing on financial returns, they’re relatively low, and you should focus on languages that are rarely spoken in the United States.

Les Brésiliens ont battu un nouveau record : 56 337 homicides par an, selon le think tank Mapa da Violencia (Carte de la violence), basé à São Paulo. Les derniers chiffres disponibles sont ceux de 2012. Leur source sont les certificats de décès, totalisés ensuite dans le Système d'informations sur la mortalité du ministère brésilien de la santé. Ils montrent une hausse constante des meurtres commis au Brésil.

L'Etude globale sur l'homicide, publiée en 2011 par l'Office des Nations unies contre la drogue et le crime (UNODC), enregistrait 43 909 homicides au Brésil pour l'année 2009, soit pratiquement un meurtre sur dix parmi ceux commis dans le monde. Aucun autre pays ne dépasse le Brésil en nombre d'homicides, même pas l'Inde, dont la population est six fois plus importante.

Depuis l'an 2000, 600 000 Brésiliens ont ainsi perdu la vie. C'est une hécatombe qui dépasse certaines guerres régionales ou conflits armés. Malgré l'escalade de la barbarie provoquée par les cartels de la drogue au Mexique, le cas du Brésil est plus grave. Malgré les guérillas en Colombie et la reconversion d'une partie des milices paramilitaires en bandes criminelles, la situation au Brésil est pire.

Les statisticiens comparent le nombre de victimes à la population. Les 56 337 meurtres de 2012 équivalent à un taux de 29 homicides pour 100 000 habitants. De ce point de vue, des petits pays d'Amérique centrale, le Honduras et le Salvador, restent les plus meurtriers, mais le volume de victimes n'est absolument pas comparable.

Up to 40,000 people a year die on Brazil's roads - a toll blamed on poor driving conditions, inexperienced motorists and high levels of drink-driving. Campaigners, including families of some victims, are fighting to bring down that toll.

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In 2009, Brazil ranked eight in the World Health Organisation's list of road deaths by country. In 2010, 42,844 died from road accidents, according to Brazil's Ministry of Health - an increase of 21% from 2006.

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The scale of Brazil's problem is illustrated by research from the University of Sao Paulo (USP) comparing the number of road accident casualties here with those of developed countries.

Researchers compared the number of cars on the road and their total mileage.

Brazil had a ratio of 54.8 fatal victims for each 1bn kms (625m miles) travelled in 2010. In the UK, the total was 3.6 and in Sweden, only 3.2.

"Developed countries invest more resources in traffic safety," says researcher Jorge Tiago Bastos.

According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, Brazil was ranked 69th among 175 countries, up from last year when it ranked 72nd among 177 countries. The Index, prepared since 1995 measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption in the countries surveyed based on data and research supplied by independent institutions and analyzed by specialists.

The NGO says that more than two thirds of the 175 countries scored below fifty, on a scale from zero (perceived to be highly corrupt) to one hundred (perceived to be very clean). Denmark comes out on top in 2014 with a score of 92 while North Korea and Somalia share last place, scoring just eight.

“The 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index shows that economic growth is undermined and efforts to stop corruption fade when leaders and high level officials abuse power to appropriate public funds for personal gain,” said José Ugaz, the chair of Transparency International.

This year Brazil came in tied with countries such as Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Senegal, and behind Latin American countries such as Chile and Uruguay. Among the BRICS, the country fared better than China, Russia and India but was behind South Africa. According to Ugaz the index highlights the problems that emerging economies have with public sector corruption, misappropriation of funds and bribery.