Yes, both the reduction in the amount of reading and the reduction in the complexity of the average read text is leading towards a decline in cognition. Less than half of American adults have read a book in the last year, and younger people are reading less books[0].
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.
I use Outlook to compose emails at work, and outlook's grammar system is constantly telling me to remove certain words from my sentences.
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."
dundercoder · 4h ago
We don’t let our kids on to TikTok, but all their friends are on and it surprises me how much they take whatever advice is shown them as gospel. Lucky for me my kids will tell me “Hey, Johnny said the best way to get ripped is X” so I get the chance to teach proper research techniques (for the level they are at). Two of my four kids are avid readers, mostly fiction but some not, the other two I am really struggling to get them engaged.
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.
thevagrant · 1h ago
Solution for my kids was buy or borrow whatever books they show interest in.
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.
mkbkn · 4h ago
How do one train their kids to read?
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.
dundercoder · 4h ago
We read to them from the time they were born. Simple stories and picture books at first. I think exposure is key, but I’ve also found that kids learn way more with what they observe than what they are told to do. So they see mom and dad reading is going to have a much larger effect than just telling them to read. We take them to the local library and let them pick whatever books they want to try. One of ours took a long time to ever find anything, then discovered he loved dragons, so for a year he devoured any dragon book. Even graphic novels, which I had thought “Isn’t my 12 year old to old for these?” Primed the pump and she’ll go through 2-3 chapter books per week.
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.
Reading increases vocabulary, which are the building blocks that ideas are formed.
Perfection.
ryandrake · 4h ago
> Less than half of American adults have read a book in the last year, and younger people are reading less books[0].
-fewer books-
...sorry, I had to, since we're talking about literacy :)
lmm · 33m ago
Do longer sentences mean better ideas, or are they just circumlocutions and embellishments? I can certainly believe that today's readers demand shorter sentences and books that express their thesis clearly and simply. I would need more evidence to believe they're wrong to.
nomilk · 4h ago
Many mainstream headlines are predicated on false assumptions. I read fewer books now days, but I read more overall, it's just off screens rather than paper.
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.
raincole · 3h ago
Yeah. Take this very article for example. The title:
> 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?
lordnacho · 4h ago
It's marketization, the decline is a symptom.
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.
themafia · 5h ago
I think for B.S. to stand up in print it needs to be fairly well crafted.
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.
AnimalMuppet · 5h ago
Don't think I agree. Think of it in economic terms of supply and demand. If something becomes cheaper to produce, you get more of it.
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.)
ethbr1 · 2h ago
Exhibit A for how US political discourse has become dumber: presidential debates.
Maybe it is exactly because books are so cheap nowadays that nobody aspires to own them.
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.
jdhendrickson · 5h ago
If you are in the USA and don't believe the ratio of bullshit to reality has changed, I would like to know what news sources you are using.
makeitdouble · 4h ago
While I get the sentiment, the US led a 7 year invasion war in Iraq based on pure bullshit allegations.
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.
noosphr · 4h ago
And 60 years ago the US got into Vietnam on a completely fabricated incident.
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.
ethbr1 · 2h ago
If we want to be precise, the US got into Vietnam because the French left Vietnam (and someone made the argument that it couldn't possibly be left to the USSR and China).
lovich · 4h ago
Yea but that could be traced to specific individuals just lying(where that blame lands depends on your political preference)
There’s definitely an increase in just basic disconnect from reality type discourse.
makeitdouble · 3h ago
A few individuals lying wouldn't fly if the general public didn't buy/turn a blind eye on it.
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)
lovich · 2h ago
> A few individuals lying wouldn't fly if the general public didn't buy/turn a blind eye on it.
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
Telemakhos · 4h ago
Remember the Maine!
FridayoLeary · 4h ago
the onion?
hamza_q_ · 4h ago
It's remarkable that Marshall McLuhan's ideas haven't entered the public conscience yet.
RajT88 · 2h ago
That book is brutally dense reading. It almost needs a translation for normal folks.
It is absolutely no wonder the ideas have not caught on more.
mapontosevenths · 4h ago
53% of American adults read below the sixth grade level. No idea that requires more than a sixth grade education will ever be mainstream again.
Huxley was right.
SoftTalker · 4h ago
It’s been a long time, if ever, that people voted for ideas. They vote for party, as they always have, or for a charismatic candidate.
cosmicgadget · 4h ago
This may be more symptom than disease. It's not like Dickens is a going to be more effective at teaching critical thinking or geopolitical awareness than a spoken lecture or debate.
It's just that in place of casual reading people choose brain rot, not because of the reading but because of the stimulation.
dehrmann · 4h ago
Every election, while I'm working on filling out my sample ballot, I visit the candidates' websites to see what they claim to stand for. Almost without exception, there's never any depth or nuance to their stances, and it's sprinkled with fearmongering dog whistles.
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.
Taek · 4h ago
I would say it's a different problem.
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.
Whoppertime · 3h ago
I'm not sure that Biden had more eyeballs in 2020 but this seems generally true
techpineapple · 6h ago
I wonder if politics is a top line issue or a bottom line issue. Teenagers never seriously paid attention to politics when I was a kid, now everyone does. So are people really getting dumber or are dumber people getting into politics.
acdha · 4h ago
We certainly did when I was a kid towards the end of the Cold War, but it was moderated by the major players serving broad audiences so they tended not to knowingly repeat falsehoods and the biases were more subtle such as selecting which stories got more coverage. It certainly wasn’t perfect but things like keeping advertisers happy tended to cut against putting conspiracy theorists and fabulists on prime time.
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.
jltsiren · 4h ago
That goes in cycles. Some generations are more politically active than others, as young people tend to find their own things to do. The late 60s and most of the 70s were politically pretty active, as there were a lot of young people and the society was changing rapidly. 1968 was probably the year of peak youth activism, both in the Western and the Soviet blocks.
morkalork · 4h ago
I wanted to say something about the youth vote back then and how they've changed since but it doesn't sound like they have at all. In 1972 Nixon won their votes and they're the boomers voting for the same dumb politics as today, reading and phones/internet be damned:
well dumber people are getting into politics because gerrymandering is getting worse. the case where politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around leads to worse overall outcomes because the seats are "safe" from the other party and competition. without competition quality falls
zeroonetwothree · 4h ago
Gerrymandering is only possible to such an extent now because everyone now has such strong partisan affiliation that their voting patterns are easily predictable. 95% of the population as soon as they see R or D by the name look no further. That’s also why we don’t have many centrist candidates anymore, they lost the ability to pull from the other side and they have a disadvantage within their own party.
corimaith · 4h ago
The latter. Because it's better to not know something and know that you don't, than to confidently misunderstand something. And Teenagers have alot of ego that admitting being wrong or misled can be hard for them, even internally.
bell-cot · 4h ago
Admitting that a copy of Dickens' "Bleak House" rests its worthy spine but a few feet from my own humble desk. And that I find that weighty tome's opening paragraphs to be a classic Dickensian wall of words - which only some might appreciate to be a complex and subtle mosaic of myriad parts of Her Majesty's English*, brilliantly arrayed upon the page as brightly colored marbles might be affixed to the full expanse of a beloved garden wall. If, I will confess, rather longer and taller than the entirely practical need of such a wall, in and of itself, might be.
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.
KittenInABox · 4h ago
It isn't clear to me that one is causal to the other. It uses for example the top NYT bestseller books sentence complexity. But that might mean that the media ecosystem is intentionally pushing simpler books, as we know the bestseller list is very often gamed by moneyed interests and industry pushes.
For one thing, while not everyone reads novel-length tracts or deep introspective literature, today, a vastly greater number of people than ever in history are able to read, and daily do indeed read a considerable volume of words, ranging from the banal to the entertaining to the modestly intellectual and beyond. The evidence that this reading, even if much of it is short and very succinct, is somehow worsening cognitive performance than reading fewer things but of greater length, is shaky at best so far.
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.
m-s-y · 4h ago
No, it’s the paywalls. Can’t read what we can’t see.
senectus1 · 4h ago
thats a different problem.
Still a problem tho.
raincole · 4h ago
You know books cost money too, right?
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.
bethekidyouwant · 3h ago
This is really dumb was politics smarter in the 50s? Give me a fucking break.
arkis22 · 5h ago
Mamdani was largely propelled by disillusionment of the young who then voted for him. They listen to the headline political message and they don't understand the underlying principles, his policies will not make them better off. But he'll try and fail, and then they'll just increasingly think the system is broken. If they read more they would understand that. It's the same thing that propelled Trump into office
yongjik · 3h ago
Mamdani ran against Cuomo, a disgraced sex offender, and the incumbent Adams, whose corruption scandal was so bad that Trump pardoned him to sow chaos among the Democratic party. If I were a NYC resident I'd vote for a sack of potatoes over these two.
How someone gets "young people don't read" from this is beyond me.
dmbche · 4h ago
Humor me - concisely, what's so blatantly bad and failure prone about hos policies? Self evident enough that had the youngsters "read past the outline" they would have had to have got?
CGMthrowaway · 4h ago
Not OP, and I'm actually voting for him, but I think a lot of people are critical of the taxes that will be required to fund all his social programs, including:
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)
arkis22 · 4h ago
rent control just limits supply. city owned grocery stores is a huge capital and organization outlay just to save 2% margin with a huge opportunity cost. at least he backed down from defunding the police. the socialist democratic organization he belongs to hasnt though
anonymous_user9 · 4h ago
I think you're exaggerating his policies. He's not proposing "rent control", he's saying he won't raise the rent on existing rent-stabilized apartments. To conclude that limits supply assumes that all the extra money would be invested into new construction.
Likewise, he's only proposing a pilot program with five grocery stores, which isn't a huge capital expenditure for a large city.
arkis22 · 3h ago
You literally just described rent control.
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
anonymous_user9 · 3h ago
Those apartments are already under rent control, and they'd be just as rent controlled if he allowed a rent increase. So, if "rent control limits supply", the supply will be limited no matter what he does.
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.
FridayoLeary · 4h ago
Can you point me to any major socialist success stories? I was going to ask that rhetorically but i would actually be happy if you could educate me. Certainly running an entire country on socialism almost always ends really badly, but maybe that's not the same on a city level? Or maybe mamdani has discovered the perfect set of policies to make it work.
dragonwriter · 4h ago
> Can you point me to any major socialist success stories?
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.
They kind of abandoned socialism in the 80s and 90s precisely because it's awful. Thatcher pointed out that no other political experiment has been carried on for so long as socialism despite it's spectacular failure. She thoroughly destroyed the socialist system in Britain and probably saved the country. I'm not sure what happened in the rest of europe.
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.
desert_rue · 4h ago
There are a lot of people who voted for Trump who are older and now actively worse off. It’s not just the young who are disillusioned.
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-...
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."
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.
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.
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
Perfection.
-fewer books-
...sorry, I had to, since we're talking about literacy :)
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
It is absolutely no wonder the ideas have not caught on more.
Huxley was right.
It's just that in place of casual reading people choose brain rot, not because of the reading but because of the stimulation.
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.
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.
https://archive.ph/qW2iE
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
* https://ia800101.us.archive.org/27/items/Various_PDFs/NeilPo...
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.
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.
How someone gets "young people don't read" from this is beyond me.
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)
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.is/sx6I2
which of the groups do you think read vs just swallow cable news?