Is the decline of reading making politics dumber?
economist.com
economist.com
The empirical evidence for cognitive benefits of reading books is so numerous and obvious that citing sources feels silly. Reading increases vocabulary, which are the building blocks that ideas are formed. This alone would be worth the time cost but reading also increases concentration, improves memory, and reduces cognitive decline.
Reading books is roughly the same level of benefit as exercise.
[0] https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-...
After being forced to read books in high school over the summer (school mandated summer reading) I got turned off on reading for years until I picked up Harry Potter. That changed my perspective and I read gobs of books now. I actually prefer to read information mostly than to watch a video about it.
One idea I read somewhere (online) is to financially incentivize them once they get an understanding of cash/money. No clue if it would work or how effective it would be.
My kid is on the way and my spouse has zero interest in reading.
We also made age appropriate audiobooks available to them and all 4 adore listening. Congrats on your baby! I’ve never been more exhausted in my life but I’m loving it.
Here are "a few", if still in that phase https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern
Maybe go through them yourself first to decide when is appropriate, and talk about how compilations of old thoughts can be good and bad at the same time.
As a YA author at a recent con panel put it: "I let my kids read any book they want, but I describe the themes. Sometimes, they decide they might not be ready for specific topics"
Help kids censor for themselves, if they choose. (Personally, less-so on censoring for them, especially books)
(The author of Dragonriders of Pern, unfortunately, is not a good enough writer that her addition of certain topics into the books could be said to improve the books. I'll leave you with <https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Tent_Peg_Statement>. It's still a fun series, even if the author is not someone I'd invite for dinner!)
A big discussion point in the panel, which I agree with, is that kids will move on to more mature themes when they're ready (and not before).
Retarding that development process by deciding what is and isn't age appropriate for them (a) breaks down trust and communication and (b) substantially raises the risk of their doing so secretly, which increases the very risk you're trying to prevent.
We may have had different childhoods, but no bans my parents put in place that I felt strongly about weren't circumvented.
My philosophy on parenting is that you should support and be involved in your child's development, at the pace they choose, not plan and meter it.
What did you intend to be the consequences of appropriate vs inappropriate in the above?
To think of replacing that shared time with a financial incentive comes across as really cold. (Sorry.) Also, way too late!
If they like reading comics, then get a stack of comics.
I allowed them to stay up later (if they want) but the condition is that time only can be used for reading. They really enjoyed that and it helped.
In time they traded the comics to fiction novels and their reading ability kept improving. They now get books from the library on their own and read quite a lot for their age. No parental pressure needed, they are addicted.
I just finished the Odyssey, a required book in high school, after I previously finished the Iliad, which wasn't required in high school. Reading those two together after reading Stephen Fry's Mythos and Heroes books was a wonderful experience that I felt could have been replicated in high school rather than the whirlwind of bouncing around to unrelated books like the Catcher in the Rye.
-fewer books-
...sorry, I had to, since we're talking about literacy :)
Perfection.
For example, I would send an email saying something like "there's actually another permission I need to grant you so you can see this, so I'm submitting the form real quick to take care of that."
Outlook will request that I change it to "there's another permission I need to grant you so you can see this, so I'm submitting a form to take care of that."
Books are 200 pages long not because they have 200 pages of content to say, but because there is no business model for publishing physical books of 50 to 100 pages long.
We see the more is better mentality everywhere in marketing. On Udemy, instructors flaunt how many hours of videos their courses have. On Steam, we see "X levels, Y different enemies, Z characters" all the time. In OP article:
> Open the Victorian bestseller “Modern Painters” by John Ruskin and you will find that its first sentence is 153 words long
As if this is a good thing.
She's also said that the king has no power because we have a parliament and a PM and elections.
You and I both know these are generally correct, but we also both know that they're not.
I generally, without shutting her down, interject with nuances and exceptions and minute details and 5 minutes later they have both stopped listening, which is fine.
Kids need clear simple truths and rules, even if there are exceptions. And as they get older, they can start learning the nuances and enjoy navigating the exceptions and maybe have ice cream late on a wednesday once in a blue moon, and their teeth wont fall out.
If adults never grow beyond a binary mindset and demand shorter ideas despite this meaning incomplete or wholly broken ideas, we have already lost.
It's no wonder selling simple solutions to complex problems is so successful in politics today, but you will never solve anything by lossily compressing complex reality into incomplete or wrong solutions.
TL;DR: <Won't Fix>
Generally, when expressing nuanced ideas, a series of short sentences doesn't convey weighting of concepts as fluidly as a longer sentence which can paint a richer and more detailed picture with selective emphasis.
I recently went on an analogue book binge, and discovered something I'd not previously noticed. Possibly for commercial reasons, books tend to frequently be much longer than they need to be, (coincidentally) they're often a minimum of 200-250 pages. Books that could easily have their content conveyed in 25 or 50 pages will be padded to 200. And not just literary trash (of which there's a lot) but books that are highly recommended reading.
Another big disadvantage of books is you receive exactly 1 perspective. Whereas if you actively research a domain with web access, you can cross reference and absorb a variety of contrasting (/conflicting) sources, and by smashing the ideas together enough, you can figure out which arguments are strongest.
I'd also argue the study mentioned in the article is unfair. Not understanding English from the early 1800's doesn't make you an idiot; a lot of the context and literally the words and language itself are very different to modern English. I can sometimes more easily understand written Greek, Spanish or French (I don't speak any of those languages) than old English.
> Is the decline of reading making politics dumber?
And the only parts where the author justified the title are:
> At its simplest, Athenians in the fifth century BC could begin to practise “ostracism”—voting to banish people by writing their name on ostraka, scraps of pots—because, as William Harris, an academic, points out, they had achieved “a certain amount of literacy”.
And:
> We also analysed almost 250 years of inaugural presidential addresses using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. George Washington’s scored 28.7, denoting postgraduate level, while Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, the reading level of a high-schooler.
I don't know, man. I found this super unconvincing. Were Athenians reading more than modern citizens in developed countries? Is "ostracism" even a good way to run a country? Do we want presidential addresses to be harder to read? Especially when we're comparing to Washington, who came to power in an era when the general population didn't vote for president?
It's almost like the author is appealing to confirmation bias. Surely we intuitively think the decline of reading makes politics dumber. So the author doesn't even bother to support their claim. Just throw in some random examples off the top of their head and call it a day.
Our knee-jerk reaction is Tiktok = information junk food. But isn't this article, printed on The Economists, simply less-digestible junk food?
> Do we want presidential addresses to be harder to read?
This is a very reductive question.
How would you address the dumbing down of politics?
> Especially when we're comparing to Washington, who came to power in an era when the general population didn't vote for president?
Thanks for asking this as I was not aware of how low the national turnout was for early presidential elections.
That said, a comparison of the Flesh-Kincaid readability score over time[0] compared to a chart of national turnout over time[1] shows that the trend only gets more consistent once national turnout of eligible voters surpasses 50%.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/feb/12/st...
Clearly George Washinton had much lesser motivation to appeal to the general population than Trump does. If the comparison was made between, say, Trump and Reagan, it'd be slightly more convincing to me.
> How would you address the dumbing down of politics?
I don't know. Of course I don't know. Which was why I read this article: I expected it to answer this question for me. But I found it did a very poor job at this, as
1) Comparing to Washinton makes little sense.
2) I don't think "easier to understand" means "dumber." I expect if you asked Flesch and Kincaid themselves whether they think a text of lower Flesch–Kincaid readability score means it's "dumber" they would say no.
[0]: And except this article 'inspired' me to write the above comment and therefore made me use a bit of critical thinking, perhaps.
* By contrast, decreasing literary sophistication may lead to decreasing political sophistication.
* Lose the ability to read complex prose and he fears you may also lose the ability to develop complex ideas that “allow you to see nuance and to hold two contradictory thoughts together”. The medium is the message, and the message is currently 280 characters long.
However, I also agree with you that the article does not present evidence that directly supports its arguments.
Studies linking reading comprehension & critical thinking (which I expect means the ability to navigate complex thought) certainly do exist & should have been mentioned.
> I expect if you asked Flesch and Kincaid themselves whether they think a text of lower Flesch–Kincaid readability score means it's "dumber" they would say no.
The "dumber" adjective isn't regarding the text, but the intended audience.
The lower Flesch–Kincaid readability score of inaugural presidential addresses is a lagging indicator of the dumbing down of politics, not a cause.
> Comparing to Washington makes little sense.
Democratization of American politics is a confounding factor, but also directly related. The elites would have higher reading comprehension, so increased democratization would require a dumbing down of politics.
Similarly, the decline in the lower Flesch–Kincaid readability score is noticeably stronger after inaugural presidential addresses stopped being delivered in written form.
So I think that using Washington for comparison is perfectly fine considering that the trend has continued incrementally throughout American history.
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, written in the 1790s and published in 1813, is more difficult to read than 3 languages one doesn't speak?
Yes, a modern reader may not understand a word here and there. I myself did a double take when reading a Victorian mystery novel by T.W. Speight and the detective was discussing his cup of tea while discussing the case. I didn't throw up my hands and stop reading. I understood the general drift of the scene and continued on enjoying the rest of the novel. I later confirmed that "discuss" had an archaic meaning of consuming a food or beverage, but even if I hadn't, I still would have enjoyed the book. And "whiskers" in a Dickens' novel per the article is not exactly a show-stopper.
Padding is perhaps a problem in books (especially when it takes 100-200 pages to get into a novel!), but I see a worse problem online: everyone and their brother gaming the systems (LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, Quora, Reddit, etc.) by posting articles about technical topics about which they know very little and getting the content very, very wrong. Incorrect information which then gets disseminated to countless readers who accept it as the gospel truth and who, in turn, then disseminate it in one form or another to countless others.
The enormity of the flood of information on the internet also makes it difficult to distinguish multiple perspectives, let alone decide which perspectives are credible. The reader has to rely on -- just like with books -- experience and will eventually learn to reach out to respected sources and references.
I might not be a huge fan of the verbosity of Ulysses or A Song of Ice and Fire for that matter, but I also don't believe that reading is or should be an exercise in data throughput optimization, whether in fiction or non-fiction.
In fiction you set a tone, paint a picture, fill out characters, motivations, parallell arcs, etc, not to mention just appreciating the flow of prose.
In non-fiction you can explain things from various perspectives, repeat things which is crucial to learning, as well as expand something beyond the topic itself, which can make it easier to retain it when you have something already familiar to anchor it to.
> Another big disadvantage of books is you receive exactly 1 perspective. Whereas if you actively research a domain with web access, you can cross reference and absorb a variety of contrasting (/conflicting) sources, and by smashing the ideas together enough, you can figure out which arguments are strongest.
It's okay to read multiple books.
Disagree. The subjects were "Students of literature at two American universities". They are supposed to be quite used to reading and explaining flowery, metaphorical, and older language. This is comparable to a supposed PHP programmer being flummoxed by a few hundred lines of messy PHP 5 code. Or an American History teacher who doesn't know Lee from Grant.
Pedantic Notes:
- For those unfamiliar, "Old English" is a specific thing. It fell out of use around 1150, and is seriously unreadable if you only know Modern English - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#The_Lord's_Prayer Vs. "Modern English" was used from (roughly) 1650 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_English Shakespeare wrote from 1585 to 1613, and is still quite understandable.
- "Bleak House" was written in the early 1850's.
EDIT: But I definitely agree with you about far too many books being stuffed with filler fluff. And that it's for commercial reasons - what market is there, these days, for 25 to 50 page works? Outside of recommendations for a very short list of people, I just don't buy books without spending a half hour skimming and reading them.
People like the dons mentioned in the article used to resist dumbing down the curriculum. "Read the complicated text, or you don't get a degree. I don't care if you think it's harsh, and I don't care if none of you can do it."
Now, you want to be a popular don, don't you? Wouldn't want a negative review. What do the customers think? Oh, they're used to a diet of intellectual junk food. Not much point in serving them literary vegetables, then.
Politics is the same. There has been a complete breakdown of the feedback loop of proposing new legislation and then looking at the results. That sort of thing takes attention. But it's hard to do, you know? Just give me soundbites, so I can point my finger at my least favorite politician. This has rotted both the voters and the journalists.
If we're going to let everything be decided by money, the money needs to reward good behaviors.
Talk radio and then cable news really ushered in the political entertainment era where what matters most is whether a story feels right for a narrow audience, and then the internet provided the amped up version. I wouldn’t say dumber as much as provocative but once the ad-tech engines started rewarding hot takes they became predominant.
I think the modern era has made throw away B.S. far more effective.
I don't think the total ratio of B.S. has actually changed all that much.
It wasn't the same bullshit, and it might not have been so in your face in day to day life, but I'd argue it was just as bad.
There’s definitely an increase in just basic disconnect from reality type discourse.
Apart from the few who still straight believed the bullshit while every other country involved publicly called it, I think many in the US just believed it would benefit them in the long run (cheaper oil) or just didn't care that much about war (the Gulf War didn't cause that much political trauma after all)
It wasn’t a blind eye for years. The public was more trusting of institutions back then and it took a while of failed answers and excuses and then finally investigations and leaks for people to finally believe that their government lied to them.
It was a lot easier to believe that either you didn’t have all the facts or that was a mistake had been made vs believing that the institutions were actively, maliciously, telling falsehoods
People reading many books doesn't help when a few entities control all the information people get.
This is why the internet is so important and why people who want to save us from disinformation have more blood on their hands than every false news peddler outside the government.
Or think of it in terms of Gresham's Law: Bad discourse drives out good.
But maybe... if the ratio stayed the same, but what got amplified/liked/upvoted got dumber, then the algorithms would guarantee that what we see got a higher ratio of junk. (But if that's true, then eventually the first two paragraphs will come into play, and the proportion will in fact change.)
Maybe it is exactly because education is free [at least in part of Europe] that people do not value it anymore [there].
On reflection: no, it's the phones, folks. On a recent train ride, a young woman sitting diagonnally in front from me was frantically typing on her cellphone. It appeared from a distance she was cutting out some phrase, putting it into a frame and posting it to a social network. While this took just seconds, the task was itself interrupted by her checking chat messages from multiple contacts, each of which she replied in less than two seconds. This is something that I've had to watch in public spaces a lot: the compulsion to react on incomming messages - but then at the receiving end the dopamin kicks in until a reply to the response is sent and so on, ad infinitum. Timing-wise, there is little time to think deeply about what to write, the content becomes victim to short utterance ping-pong.
2020: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wW1lY5jFNcQ
2004: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WYpP-T0IcyA
1988: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w2OIGH710aY
1960: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AYP8-oxq8ig (skipping over a few weird years there in 1972, 68, 64)
Such now said, and more to the point at hand - instead of the causality suggested by the article's title, I'd look for a common cause. When most of the population feels that their present circumstances have fallen far from their hopes of yesteryear, and their future prospects growing ever bleaker, then they neither spend time appreciating long and clever written works, nor gravitate toward wise and foresighted political positions.
Humans really ain't at their best when they're running angry, anxious, and scared.
*Mr. Dickens wrote almost entirely during the reign of Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India. And it definitely shows.
It's just that in place of casual reading people choose brain rot, not because of the reading but because of the stimulation.
Huxley was right.
I mean it should because it should be a reasonable level to reach were it not for the dismantling of the educational system, but apparently it's not.
Firstly, I should say that reading scores aren't typically measured by grade levels for this type of study. That's just a colloquialism we use to make it comprehensible to the average person. The PIAAC for example uses a numerical score that translates to "levels of competency". [1]
Still, I think it's still a valuable way to express the idea. There exist levels beyond the sixth. Even if most folks don't attain those higher levels anymore we do need some way to refer to them and the sixth grade is when a high school bound adult should have attained that level in order to keep up with later coursework.
It is absolutely no wonder the ideas have not caught on more.
Secondly, having more people than ever be able to read is still better than having a small percentage of the population be literate and reading deeply, while a vast majority can read barely anything or nothing. Since all declines have to be measured against some baseline or relative to some historical level, I have a hard time believing that there is even a decline of reading or anything making politics much dumber given that at any previous time, it was the case that fewer people read.
If anything, the seemingly more intellectually robust political discourse preserved to now from history represents a minority of all (mostly blathering) political discourse, and even in the case of that limited quantity of reasoned discourse, was aimed more at a limited audience of watchers, while completely excluding most people.
Finally, having spent years reading about history and its political elements (and their typical discourse) from the time of Rome to the present, I see nothing to make me think it's been dumbed down. If anything, the political propaganda of earlier decades and centuries was absurdly stupid, pig-ignorant and hateful by modern standards, but worked better on its contemporary audiences, who had much less access to such a vast flood of information, than does modern political propaganda on modern audiences.
Politics is dumb because the electorate lacks a deeper understanding of policies and tradeoffs, so shallow, partisan takes win elections. The problem isn't that a Dickensian metaphor went over the heads of college literature students; it's that practically all the information most adults consume is intellectual junk food, and people aren't used to challenging their views or taking on different perspective.
The winner is pretty much always the candidate that gets the most eyeballs. A voting based political structure is fundamentally deeply biased towards visibility, and candidates that can get bigger reach with their message will get more votes independent of how low quality that message is.
That has caused all popular vote based politics around the entire planet to converge on simple, viral messaging, and inflammatory messaging tends to be more viral.
The other way to phrase it would be to say that popular vote systems hold politicians accountable to the number of eyeballs their antics reach, and we need to switch to a system that holds politicians accountable to the success of their policies.
Likewise, he's only proposing a pilot program with five grocery stores, which isn't a huge capital expenditure for a large city.
That's kind of a joke right? it's a pilot program for 5 grocery stores? he wins votes off something that is something you admit is so inconsequential, while spending political capital to do it instead of other things? 2% margins baby
My mistake, I thought you meant financial capital. I disagree. It seems like grocery prices are a real problem in New York, and the existing subsidy program isn't working. Ensuring people can afford food seems like an excellent use use of political capital, and if it works it can be scaled up.
Raising property taxes while freezing rents (meaning your shitty NYC apt will never be repaired again), $30 min wage and corporate tax increase and 0.1% tax of stock and options trades (driving jobs away)
Isn't it interesting that the most capitalist country in the world is also the most successful, while the similarly sized and more socialist leaning eu is lagging behind?
Also there's a difference between economic socialism, and the capitalist liberal democracies that run on some social principles like the eu and uk.
The ongoing Socialist Evolution starting with the migration of pretty much the entire developed world over the middle part of the 20th Century from relatively pure capitalism to modern mixed economies that been a pretty big success story in terms of human welfare, despite some periods of widespread or more local backsliding.
which of the groups do you think read vs just swallow cable news?
How someone gets "young people don't read" from this is beyond me.
Still a problem tho.
If people are reading less now than they did in 1980, clearly it's not because of the paywalls. Reading is one of the few things that got cheaper and cheaper if you count inflation.
It's quite the opposite: we have way more free entertainment than before.