
Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’ - bootload
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/may/29/boys-books-earnings-adults
======
tokenadult
I'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](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf)

~~~
njohnson41
There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both
caused by higher family socio-economic status.

~~~
qb45
Or higher social status being the result of having books and a good job.

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stuxnet79
Honestly, I spent a lot of my childhood / teen years reading and engaging in
other solitary activities and I sometimes feel like my time would have been
better served trying to connect with my peers. I still read a lot these days,
but I just do it with no expectation to derive future benefit from it. Mind
you my reading these days is 70% non-fiction. I put reading in the same
category of entertainment as TV and video games (FWIW I don't believe either
medium sucks compares to literature, and you get out of it what you put in).
Am I alone on this?

~~~
gambler
Unpopular opinion time...

A lot of written fiction constitutes an intelligent person intently thinking
about some subject, drawing upon their experienec and communicating their
ideas. This kind of thing happens much more rarely on TV and in video games.
And it almost never happens in casual communication.

Now, if you buy the increasingly popular notion that ideas and perspectives
don't matter, than you're unlikely to derive anything worthwhile out of _any_
medium. I know a lot of people who can't, and for them all the media does look
like vacuous entertainment. They read Orwell's 1984 and simply _don 't get
it_. They start criticizing its technology or character development and simply
don't see the underlying messages.

~~~
skiningham
Not disagreeing with you, but how do we consume the ideas and perspectives of
people who don't write books?

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asuffield
Strongly correlates with socioeconomic status. This research is telling us:
wealthy children grow up to be wealthy adults.

~~~
yeahbutbut
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.

~~~
chongli
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.

~~~
barry-cotter
The average American watches three hours of TV a day. They are not lacking for
free time to read books if they wanted to.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-
watch...](http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-
watches-5-hours-tv-day-article-1.1711954)

~~~
mgkimsal
"leisure" was probably the wrong word, in context. The sort of 'leisure' (or
pastime) of watching TV can be _completely_ passive. One can 'watch' TV for
2-3 hours and literally not have to think about anything difficult. Reading a
book is far more of an 'activity - requiring active thought processing - than
TV watching. And for many people, reading a book is anything but pleasure.

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Moshe_Silnorin
Unless they control for the heritability of intelligence this is a "wet
streets cause rain" story.

~~~
ryandrake
Not to mention the heritability of economic status. Rich families have rich
kids that grow up to be rich adults. News at 11.

~~~
andrepd
Thus is the right answer, not "inheritability of intelligence". Economic
status propagates through generations much more directly than any genetic
quality like intelligence (which isn't even a quality commanded to a
significant degree by genetics)

~~~
ars
> Economic status propagates through generations much more directly

Economic status only lasts on average 3 generations.

> genetic quality like intelligence (which isn't even a quality commanded to a
> significant degree by genetics)

Actually quite the opposite. Intelligence is almost entirely genetic.

The reason you think economic status propagates is actually that intelligence
propagates, and intelligence is strongly correlated with income.

~~~
barry-cotter
> Economic status only lasts on average 3 generations.

Gregory Clark's work "The Som Also Rises", "A Farewell to Alms" and his
various articles suggest the heritability of socioeconomic status is around
0.7 and is uniform across all human societies he and his team have studied.
The upper class maintain their social status if not their wealth.

The same surnames that were over represented among Qing dynasty mandarins are
over represented among upper level PRC officials. One in five Swedish prime
ministers have had surnames indicative of noble ancestry when holders of said
surnames are ~1% of the population.

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Paul_S
“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.

~~~
hodwik
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.

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johngossman
The 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."

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davidf18
There is going to be a correlation that those who have many books at home are
likely to be more educated than those who do not and that as a rule those who
are more educated are going to have higher incomes.

There is also going to be a correlation that those who have more books at home
and read them are going to be more curious about the world than those who do
not and this curiosity, too will lead to a higher income statistically.

My father is a humanities prof. at a major university who had thousands of
books in his home office that we would read as children growing up. We would
discuss books and ideas at the dinner table. Thus, in effect we children
received a liberal arts education at home.

Today, with a $75 kindle people have access to great libraries for many of the
classics are freely accessible. Shakespeare, Twain, George Elliot, Dickens,
Shaw, ... all free to download and read. Moreover, many ebooks still under
copyright can be checked out electronically from public libraries and read.

The studies reported of course were observational. It would be interesting to
prospectively perform a study placing books in a number of households and
seeing how children develop over 20 years.

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mianos
This 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...](http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/09/correlation-does-not-imply-
causation/)

~~~
vixen99
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.

~~~
mianos
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.

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abalashov
Who knew? Although, it goes without saying that this is a correlation, not
causation.

If you stock culturally illiterate parents' house with books, it would--to
borrow from a Soviet fable--be akin to giving a Rhesus macaque spectacles. (In
the fable, the monkey tries everything possible with the glasses, including
putting them on its tail. Everything except the intended application.)

~~~
SeeDave
Pearls before swine, cargo cult, etc.

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rrss1122
I didn't live in a house with books, but my mother took me and my sisters to
the library very often when we were kids. For me personally, I believe that
access to books gave me much of my motivation to learn, particularly with
regards to astronomy. It was early reading of astronomy books that got me
really interested in science. Growing up, I didn't do particularly well in
language and literature, mainly because I just wasn't interested. If I hadn't
been allowed to develop an innate interest in science through astronomy, I
doubt I would have done as well in math and science classes as I did because I
expect I would have found them uninteresting too. I credit that early interest
in science as a big factor in me now having a well-paying programming career.

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n72
Absolutely 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.

~~~
2501
Dude, that's kind of funny. It's like you even answered your own question
already in the question itself. And didn't even notice it. Judging by my own
experience it's not so much the age part but the foreign language part the
comes into play. ;)

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lpolovets
I found the results of the study very interesting, but I wonder why it was
limited to boys. That seems kind of arbitrary. Why not all children?

~~~
gaius
If the same study was just girls, would you also object?

The truth is that boys are falling behind academically, I think most normal
people would agree that in a well designed educational system, gender would
not factor in outcome.

~~~
lpolovets
It was less an objection than an honest question -- and I'd still have the
same question if the study was just girls. One reason for the question is that
I'd actually be curious to know if there's a difference in earning power based
on gender (or income or other common variables).

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danieltillett
This is the article [1]. Unless they controlled for g then I doubt there is
much value here.

1\.
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12307/abstra...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12307/abstract)

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jbmorgado
Causation VS Correlation... always a mystery to some minds.

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erikb
What about girls and books?

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eicossa
> perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting
> books and pursuing more lucrative occupations

Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are
genetically inheritable ?

If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?

~~~
Frozenlock
>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 my children could have a
chance of having it if the mother is carrier of the bad gene. It would be wise
for me to chose someone who isn't a carrier (or even undergo a gene therapy,
once it will be available).

Why do you think eugenics is indefensible? Because some people were sterilized
in the name of it? That's only one approach. 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... I don't care at this
point, it's only for the sake of the argument.

You could also say that eugenics increases the chances of your children
finding a quality mate, because they are more numerous when the state is
subsidizing them.

Anyhow, we are animals and our evolution follows the same rules as all the
other species. If we don't purposefully decide where our evolution will bring
us, nature will do it for us. Without any external fitness function, those who
can reproduce the most will be the evolutionary winners. Ask yourself: are
those taking care of establishing a good career and establishing a solid
financial foundation the ones with the most children?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0)

Again, we are animals. We are subject to the same rules. If we decide to
ignore them, our children will pay the price.

~~~
qb45
> 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 are doing.

~~~
wbl
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.

~~~
jschwartzi
A lot of people say "Aspie" when they really just mean "socially mal-adjusted
turbo nerd." It happens that lots of smart people are generally nice and can
read a room. You just don't hear about them because they aren't constantly
talking about their IQ.

