Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
theguardian.com
Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#2This gets dug up once a year. Someone somewhere in the world gets their research funded looking into this.
http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/09/correlation-does-not-impl...
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#3Strongly correlates with socioeconomic status. This research is telling us: wealthy children grow up to be wealthy adults.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#4I'm delighted that my three boys and one girl have grown up or are still growing up in a house full of books in English, Chinese, German, and other languages. Sure enough, my oldest son makes a fine income as a hacker--but wait, I grew up in a house full of books too, and I've NEVER made as much money as he already makes.
A correlational study like this can't show us the path of causation, if any. Any behavior geneticist worth his salt would immediately ask, "Do the boys earn more as grown men because they had the home environment filled with books, or perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations?" And the answer to that question, of course, is both,[1] but anyway the genes will matter.
[1] http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#5“Perhaps books matter because they encourage children to read more and reading can have positive effects on school performance. Alternatively, a home filled with books indicates advantageous socio-economic conditions.”
"Alternatively"? I think the word is conclusively or obviously.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#6Unless they control for the heritability of intelligence this is a "wet streets cause rain" story.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#7Unless they control for the heritability of intelligence this is a "wet streets cause rain" story.
Not to mention the heritability of economic status. Rich families have rich kids that grow up to be rich adults. News at 11.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#8Strongly correlates with socioeconomic status. This research is telling us: wealthy children grow up to be wealthy adults.
They could be a shelf full of $2 novels. Owning a few hundred books doesn't cost very much (thanks printing press), and only implies an interest in reading not in being of a high socioeconomic status.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#9Strongly correlates with socioeconomic status. This research is telling us: wealthy children grow up to be wealthy adults.
It's the same conclusion that the Freakanomics books made when they looked into why children who were to read at home had higher test scores.
It just turned out that parents who had libraries at home were the type of parents who were more involved in their children's academic life.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#10Strongly correlates with socioeconomic status. This research is telling us: wealthy children grow up to be wealthy adults.
They could be a shelf full of $2 novels. Owning a few hundred books doesn't cost very much (thanks printing press), and only implies an interest in reading not in being of a high socioeconomic status.
Yeah, that's the case with my family. I was in the "lower middle class" when growing up, but we had a library completely filled with books. Most of them were cheap, used books, or were just collected over the years.
In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.