What about girls and books?
Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#42Absolutely agree with the socio-economic bit being the main factor. I wonder, however, if a minor factor is the ability to skim, which is strengthened by reading young. My girlfriend is Brazilian who speaks English well and I observe her having much more trouble doing basic research and gathering random knowledge simply because she is much slower skimming in English. Whether it's looking for a restaurant or figuring out how to pay a parking ticket or whatever, while she does manage, it takes her probably 2x the time it does for me. Moreover, I think this is a barrier to acquiring more knowledge. If there is a question about something, my first instinct is to just hop on google and figure it out. Hers often times isn't, I think in part because there's just more energy and frustration involved in doing so than for me.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#43This 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...
Your link describes a dumb study. I also doubt that for instance, dumping truck loads of unwanted library books in kids' houses would necessarily impact on their potential for being paid for their services in the future. A thoughtful choice of books provided by their parents would likely have a different outcome.
The study cited by the original post does not consider "a thoughtful choice". It considers the number of books measured by shelf space. Studying the consideration of material by their parents would, IMHO, be a worthwhile, albeit, much more difficult thing to study.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Owning books is not the hard part, it's reading them. Reading a novel takes a lot of time and is a singularly self-centered leisure activity. People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time. Heck, the image of a person lounging with a book has a very strong cultural link to (non-working class) status.
> People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time.
Where did you get this idea? It's certainly not accurate in the US.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#45The Guardian article leaves it sounding like the only thing they considered was books, but the abstract mentions some of the controls:
"We estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals with access to many or few books at home at age 10. We instrument years of education using compulsory school reforms and find that, whereas individuals in rural areas were most affected by the reforms, those with many books enjoyed substantially higher returns to their additional education. We show that books retain explanatory power even when we select relatively homogeneous groups in terms of the economic position of the household."
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but it's not like we can just sit on our hands and wait until we are 100% sure of what we could do; the welfare state is already selecting for us. And in my experience, most people are opposed to getting rid of the welfare state. This means that the choice is not "eugenic or do nothing", it's "eugenic or dysgenic".
Welfare states seem to depopulate recently so if it's true that they produce "unfit" people, they are harming more themselves than anybody else.
This is a short-term effect, and you have the fitness function backwards.
The portion of the population that takes action to avoid living in squalor is unfit because they fail to reproduce well enough for replacement. Meanwhile, the portion of the population that fails to avoid squalor is breeding in a most exponential way. That portion was historically kept in check by death, but now has been unleashed.
So one type of person is on the way to extinction, and another type is growing without bound. Currently this means the the total population (both groups together) is shrinking, but that will change.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#47“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.
If you corrected for economic class, you'd certainly still see the same thing -- a culture of literacy improves lifetime earnings.
At least anecdotally, I grew up rather poor (single mother household, working as greenhouse manager, 4 kids), but we had a strong culture of literacy in my household.
Knowing how to read difficult material, and by extension self-teach, was a big part of my ability to move into tech.
Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#48I'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 geneti…
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Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welfare states seem to depopulate recently so if it's true that they produce "unfit" people, they are harming more themselves than anybody else.
This is a short-term effect, and you have the fitness function backwards. The portion of the population that takes action to avoid living in squalor is unfit because they fail to reproduce well enough for replacement. Meanwhile, the portion of the population that fails to avoid squalor is breeding in a most exponential way. That portion was historically kept in check by death, but now has been unleashed. So one type…
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Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? Intelligence as we can measure it (IQ) is highly related to genetics (so you can say inheritable). IQ is correlated to 0.86 in case of twins raised in the same family, or 0.76 in twins raised appart. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? Nothing! I myself have spinal muscular atrophy and know that m…
> You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... And have a world full of Aspergers and Schizos (correlated with IQ) or some giant mutants unable to survive the next asteroid strike. I hope you get the point - we have no idea what we…
You say that like being an Aspie is bad. Of course IQ genes don't as far as we know have bad side effects. It seems Fischerian, and actually uncorrected to ASD.