>
what a weird statement by the article's authorI can never understand this reasoning.
The statement by the article's author covers 80% or more of kids, who mostly don't read (and 90% or more reads zero to one book a year).
It's like someone noting that "people have one nose" and somebody arguing, "This is such a weird statement to make, my neighbour, who was on a traffic accident, has none"!
Extreme Outliers (1-2%), or even smaller minorities (3-10%) don't make a general statement "weird", at worse they make it not exhaustive.
(...) Conducted by psychologist and professor Jean Twenge, the study finds that the reading decline among American teens is worse than expected. In 2016, only 16 percent of high school seniors reported daily reading of a book or magazine. Roughly 40 years ago, 60 percent of high school seniors did the same.
(...) About a third of 12th graders also said they had not read a book or e-book for pleasure in the last year — which is about triple the number who said so in the 1970s.
Not much better for adults:
(...) The share of men reading for pleasure on any given day fell from 25 percent in 2004 to 15 percent in 2017, a drop of nearly 40 percent. The decline among women was a more modest 29 percent, from 31 percent in 2003 to 22 percent in 2017. The survey data shows declines in leisure reading across all age levels.
(...) Between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours. (...) From a breakdown of reading by income quartile, it turns out that the rich read more—but they read less and less every year. Americans in the lowest income quartile did manage to read more in 2016 than they did in 2003—a rare trend—but that’s probably a dead-cat bounce; the 2003 number was so low that it was as likely to improve as not.
https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.as...
Sources: New Yorker, WP, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc.