
Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study - devy
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/growing-surrounded-books-may-bolster-skills-later-life-180970523/?no-ist
======
fhood
I grew up in a household that had passed that 350 book mark, and beyond all of
the actual meaningful improvements it has made to my life, it also meant that
reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy. So teach
your kids to love books, and enjoy reading. It doesn't have to be high-brow
intellectually challenging shit, just make sure that they associate books with
fun.

~~~
TallGuyShort
>> it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was
laughably easy

I'm actually curious to hear how various HNers have done on on standardized
reading comprehension tests. I grew up with massive bookcases in the house,
I've now populated my own, I read a lot, get a lot out of it, and enjoy it. On
the ACT I had perfect scores on every category but a literal 0 on reading
comprehension. As far as I'm aware, that's always been the case on my
standardized tests, and I wasn't surprised because the questions seemed
ludicrous to me (I nodded vigorously while reading [1]). I primarily read non-
fiction and have wondered if I just don't grok fiction. What are other
people's experience on that?

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-
sheet/wp/2017/01/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-
sheet/wp/2017/01/07/poet-i-cant-answer-questions-on-texas-standardized-tests-
about-my-own-poems/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.980b67e62e34)

~~~
ip26
I read a ton as a kid, and I always struggled a bit on reading comprehension
tests. To me it generally seemed like the "reading comprehension" questions
would focus on minutia I didn't consider important, and simply didn't bother
to remember. It's been a long time since then, but I want to say I'd read a
story about a kid sledding on a hill with his friends, and then later to test
your reading comprehension they'd ask you what color his shirt was.

Maybe that _is_ reading comprehension and I am just bad at it, but to me shirt
color was unimportant.

~~~
snowwrestler
I can't imagine why just memorizing shirt colors would be worthwhile.

But if, for example, the author made it clear that the other kids were all
wearing the same color shirt and the main character was not, you might infer
something about their relationship from that--like maybe that the other kids
all went to the same school, but the lead character went to a different
school.

Details do matter for reading comprehension, because every detail is chosen.
The real world is full of superfluous detail... writing, especially good
writing, is not. Every word on the page represents a choice by the author--a
choice to put that detail in, and to use that particular word instead of a
different one.

~~~
TallGuyShort
And yet standardized test writers seem to think they understand those choices
better than the authors themselves.

~~~
snowwrestler
Critics have an opportunity to understand those choices better than the
authors themselves because critics have the opportunity to look at the work
from a different perspective.

Just because every bit of writing is a choice, that doesn't mean the author
him- or herself fully understood _why_ they made that choice. We're all shaped
by our own life experiences, our family, the time in which we grew up, etc.
Often, it's easier for a third party to connect those dots. That's why
coaching and therapy works, for instance.

That said, when we're talking about standardized tests, they tend to (and
should be) sticking to pretty well-understood and obvious examples of this
sort of thing.

And of course, sometimes they're just not well done. Standardized test writers
face the same challenges as every other writer, and I think we can guess that
the very best writers probably do not end up in that job...

~~~
TallGuyShort
I'm sorry you completely lost me in the second paragraph. If reading
comprehension comes anywhere near connecting an author's life experience to
their word choice, then I'll gladly take my 0 and call the whole thing
garbage. Sure, coaching and therapy work. They're also fields that churn out
massive amounts of pseudo-science when it suits the author's ego.

------
rossdavidh
Halfway through the article, when I saw the part about how the number of books
varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to
address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be
measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up
with a lot of books in their home. If kids in the 90th percentile for their
country (for number of books in their home) have less similar outcomes than
kids with the same number of books (from different countries), this would be
indicative that the books that actually matter." If that point is in the
article, though, it's sure not in Smithsonian's article, and since it's
Elsevier I can't look at the original. :(

~~~
SamReidHughes
I'll bet you equally good correlations can be found when the parents have a
Kindle library that the kid doesn't have access to. You'd expect articles like
this to have a paragraph, "The researchers controlled for biological heredity
by ________" but it seems they don't want you to take them seriously.

Edit: Oh, they also show that growing up in a home full of books makes you
more numerate, too. So, no surprise, there's a general intelligence factor
involved that has nothing to do with books.

------
tombert
My parents would basically (with a few exceptions due to price) buy me any
book I wanted growing up (without it hitting into my allowance); they thought
it was incredibly important to grow up well-read, and even more important to
learn how to teach yourself stuff, and similarly every standardized test I
took was insultingly easy.

I'm definitely not some pillar of intellectual vigor either (I don't even have
a college degree), so the fact that my reading comprehension is good, I think,
is because of the exposure to books.

That said, I realize that one anecdote doesn't mean anything.

~~~
kurttheviking
>That said, I realize that one anecdote doesn't mean anything.

Nevetheless, I appreciate the hack you suggested of excluding books from
allowance. As a parent, that's something I'll now implement. Thanks for
sharing.

~~~
solipsism
Do you charge your kids' allowance for food? Rent? If you all go out to eat?

It's odd to me that anyone would ever think of charging their child for a
book.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
I have heard of parents making kids buy their own clothing out of allowance,
as a way of teaching them the value of money and how to shop responsibly.

------
innocentoldguy
I completely agree with this article, based on my own anecdotal experiences (I
don't think the science behind this article was the best, but I'll save that
for another post).

My great grandma never had the chance to go to school, but she loved to read.
She would work, save up, and buy books whenever she could. Books were all she
ever wanted for her birthday or Christmas. Even though she had no formal
education to speak of, she was an intelligent woman and wrote prose and poetry
as good as any I experienced in college.

My great-grandmother's love of reading has been passed down through four
generations now (down to my children). I have over a thousand books in my
house, some of which belonged to my great-grandmother. I learned software
engineering by reading books I borrowed from my local public library and built
a successful career through reading and studying these freely available tomes
on my own. When my kids were in school, I told them to put all their efforts
into reading. I knew from personal experience that if they could read well
they would be able to learn anything they wanted to. So far, that has been the
case.

If I could only have one life skill, it would be reading. Having access to
hundreds of books growing up certainly helped me and made me who I am today.
Of course, having books around does nothing for you unless you crack them open
and read. The only downside has been schlepping all those books around every
time we move.

------
arkades
The study this summary refers to studied books as an indicator of a “culture
of scholasticism.” It didn’t even really try to disentangle socioeconomic
effects, because it was looking to use books as a proxy for them.

It did not say “books in the home make you smarter.” It was arguing “books are
a reasonable cross-cultural proxy for orientation towards scholasticism in the
home.”

This summary, to my reading of the actual article, completely confuses cause
and effect.

~~~
_red
Their confusion goes beyond using books as a proxy for scholasticism.

No doubt its just a proxy for IQ itself (higher IQ people tend to read more
books, thus own more books, thus score better on scholastic measures).

------
izzydata
I grew up in a house that had a library with 1000+ books. Unfortunately I
didn't read much of any of them. Nobody ever tried to get me to read them.
However, I blame myself for not reading much as a kid.

My point being that the mere presence of books is not enough.

~~~
xvector
I don’t think it makes sense to blame yourself. It is absolutely the job of
parents to encourage their kids to read from a young age.

To kids, reading looks terribly boring, until they actually find a book they
like - then they devour everything in sight.

How much I miss the combination of childhood imagination and fantastic
stories!

~~~
Izkata
> To kids, reading looks terribly boring, until they actually find a book they
> like - then they devour everything in sight.

 _So_ important and always ignored. My mom read to us often, and I and my
brothers hated reading. Later I encountered an Animorphs book and that was my
gateway. One of my brothers, several years after that, discovered Redwall, and
that did it for him.

~~~
2snakes
Redwall and Salamandastron were great stories. Go Matthias.

------
sna1l
I am unable to read the actual study (paywall) and this article doesn't really
talk about the methodology, but did they account for socioeconomic factors?

I would assume _on average_ that the more books your family could afford, the
more money they have.

~~~
Symbiote
Here's the paper: [https://sci-
hub.tw/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003](https://sci-
hub.tw/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003)

~~~
sna1l
Great, thanks! It looks like they didn't account for family wealth unless I'm
mistaken.

In the omitted variables section:

> However, prior research using longitudinal data from Australia with
> corrections for measurement error showed that a substantial impact of home
> library size on adult education existed net of the effects of academic
> ability (IQ) of adults or their father’s scholarly habitus (i.e. employment
> in occupations where use of books is common) as well as family income or
> wealth (Evans, et al., 2010).

------
StillBored
I wonder how outdated/lagging these studies are.

When I was a kid I was reading nearly every waking moment between say 3rd
grade and 9th because It was the only form of entertainment I had (until I got
a computer). That is because my parents thought that TV rotted a child's brain
and didn't have one in the house until after I left.

Today, my kids read, but they have phones, TV's, computers, and a ton of other
distractions that have proven nearly impossible to control without an outright
ban in the whole house.

~~~
fein
> and a ton of other distractions that have proven nearly impossible to
> control without an outright ban in the whole house.

So your parents were right.

------
georgeecollins
Leaving aside the poor science of this study, I wonder if there is any impact
to the fact that I have a large collection of books that sit on my kindle.
Living in my parents house I was surrounded and influenced by their books. My
children read a lot, but they may not be as aware as I was of what their
parents are reading. And there is a lot less of that social signaling that
happens when a guest sees a book on the bookshelf that they read or are
interested in.

------
geebee
This particular instance of correlation and causation has always been
fascinating to me.

Is it possible to have a non causal correlation that is impossible to bring
about without increasing (causing) the effect.

For instance suppose you tried an experiment of getting 500 books into a
household with a new infant and zero books. Let’s say you did this with no
special attempt to produce the cause, but made no attempt to ensure the
process of getting 500 books over there had no influence either.

How would you go about this? Ask for donations? Collect books? How would you
find donors, how would you find families to donate to?

My guess, which I make purely on a hunch, is that you would have to make
dramatic (perhaps unconscionable) efforts to ensure that this process would
not bring about the effect of higher literacy on average.

Not sure by how much but I think (just a thesis) that it would be meaningfully
measurable

~~~
bluGill
Books are cheap. I'd get 500 books from a used bookstore and put them in a hut
in some primitive village. Note that books would not be in the native
language, and nobody in the village can read anyway. My hypothesis is that
books will make no difference.

An interesting and useful experiment would be to place books in the homes of
poor people who can read but don't. Turns out cities all over the US are doing
this experiment on a large scale right now (often paid for by United Way).
While the experiment isn't completely controlled anyone who cares to can
collect data and analyse it.

~~~
geebee
Sounds like they’re running the experiment. The first scenario you described
is a good illustration of the kind of effort it would take to ensure no
effect. The second? I’d be interested in knowing how they find families and
decide what books to include. I’d expect (and I admit I hope) it will have a
measurable efect.

I’ll search for it but please post a link if you have one.

~~~
bluGill
[https://1000booksbeforekindergarten.org/](https://1000booksbeforekindergarten.org/)

They claim studies support the idea, but I'm not able to figure out which

------
ldiracdelta
Or it could be only a correlation. Smart parents have books, but they also
have smart children.

~~~
drb91
Maybe.... natural predilection is no replacement for experience, though, and
reading is a type of experience. Arguably a high quality one.

Also, there are obviously countless examples of seemingly intelligent people
having kids which aren’t.

~~~
ldiracdelta
Yes. Genetics is messy and non-exact, but on the _average_ IQ is highly
heritable.

~~~
drb91
On the average, IQ is 100. That is quite heritable. I’m not sure that’s
meaningful genetically.

Even correlated high IQ across generations can easily be a nuture over nature
deal—see the above article for one hypothesis.

Finally, even if high IQ is genetically heritable, it may still require
cultural or experiential “activation” to nuture intrinsic ability.

There are simply too many variables to casually state any causal relation.

~~~
ldiracdelta
No, the average of white people was normed at 100. I'm saying the average case
is that people are the average of their parents. I'm not a genetic determinist
and I am not an environmental determinist, but there is vast amounts of
evidence that IQ is, for a large proportion of the causality, a heritable
trait.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
Wikipedia says: "The heritability of IQ for adults is between 47% and 53% with
some more-recent estimates as high as 70% and 76%."

------
sandov
My house didn't have that many books (less than 100), but I didn't have a
computer (I'm from a developing country), so when I got extremely bored I just
picked up whatever book I could to keep myself entertained for a couple of
hours. This is how I fell in love with Asimov's stories and eventually got
into programming.

------
hereiskkb
As a child in a boarding school I actually got to grow up in a literal
library. I would say most of what I am today, the good parts, come from me
getting the opportunity to be among books, and that too of such diverse
nature.

------
bobcostas55
I liked how Matt Yglesias summarized the quality of this research: "Kids who
grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to
be tall as adults."

Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply
pseudoscience, there are no excuses.

~~~
Alex3917
> Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply
> pseudoscience, there are no excuses.

This study was done in response to the Scarborough and Dobrich paper that
found that how much parents read to their children (generally) isn't
correlated with children's future reading ability, but how many books are in
their household _is_ a positive predictor of future reading ability.

It's one of the most famous and surprising findings in all of social science.

I'd suggest rather than the authors not "understanding science" or whatever,
perhaps it's more likely that their target audience wasn't people on HN who
would complain without knowing anything about the field.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027322978...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273229784710100)

~~~
PeterisP
That's the whole point - there is research supporting the point that "how many
books are in their household is a positive predictor" not only of future
reading ability but also a bunch of other things, but there seems to be no
research supporting that "Growing Up Surrounded by Books Could Have Powerful,
Lasting Effect on the Mind". These are very, very, very different things.

In essence, a very likely explanation for the observed "childhood books vs
adult success" observation is that growing up surrounded by books is an
indicator that your parents may have higher socioeconomic status than average,
or that they have an above average educational background and IQ, or possibly
all of it, and for _those_ things it's well known that they have hereditary
(both nature-hereditary and nurture-hereditary) effects that indicate that the
kids are somewhat more likely to be successful in most aspects of life.

That observation (both in your link and in the studies described in the main
article above) is not a reason to assume any causal relationship; the original
studies don't claim that, but the article we're discussing _does_ try to imply
such claim without any appropriate justification, and _that_ is inexcusable
pseudoscience.

~~~
Alex3917
> there seems to be no research supporting that "Growing Up Surrounded by
> Books Could Have Powerful, Lasting Effect on the Mind"

Maybe not in this particular study, but the whole point is that any given
study is going to be done in the larger context of a one or more fields of
pre-existing research.

If you look at the paper I linked to, the proposed model is that in order for
kids to be good at reading, they need to read. And the kids who read the most
are going to be those who love reading. Now when you as a parent read books to
your kids, some kids will love that and others will hate it. And if you read
to them if they don't like it, that can actually turn them off from reading
and lead to them being worse at reading in the long term. Whereas if you just
leave books around the house, sooner or later they're likely going to read
some of them, and are more likely to develop a love of reading just by reading
things they're interested in when they're interested in them rather than
having reading being forced on them before they're interested.

No one is arguing that there isn't an SES component or whatever. But the
actual proposed explanation comes from the context of the last 50+ years of
research on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, and is interesting on its own.

Any one paper isn't going to look at more than one specific thing, but if
you're only looking at that one paper without understanding the larger context
of the research then you're not going to understand what's interesting about
it or why it was worth doing.

------
mti27
Even without reading them, the books on my parents' shelves had an affect on
me due to the wacky titles. They stuck in my mind and to this day, I can still
remember them: "Blind Ambition" or "The Winds of War" or "The Greening of
America" \- seeing these as a kid caused me to ask lots of questions, i.e. who
is John Dean and why is America turning green? :)

------
sudosteph
I never had much of a home library my formative years (would estimate < 50,
maybe < 30), but I always had such easy access to public libraries (in my
schools, and more importantly one within walking distance in my town) that I
still easily consumed 1-3 new books a week for most of my childhood and
teenage years. While 500 books in a home library is impressive, I almost think
that would have been more constrictive to my learning options compared to the
selections available from a public library system.

One thing I noticed, and a reason that I depended on my local public library
so much more than the school ones, is that the selection for libraries in
schools before high school is way too age restricted. I once tried to donate a
few of my favorite paperbacks (Stephen King novels) for future students, but
the librarian told me the school system would just end up transferring those
to a high school library.

Anyhow, my point is, I would be interested to know if living within walking
distance of a public library is similarly correlated with better outcomes.

------
austinheap
When I would get in trouble as a kid my mom would ground me for a certain
number of books. As I got older/wiser/in-more-trouble the requirement moved
from # of books to # of pages and she'd test me on random sections of the
readings. A++ productive way of dealing with a difficult child!

~~~
frockington
I would've loved to see the creativity that went on between you trying to get
through as many pages as possible and your mom trying to ensure you read them

------
jackconnor
There is supposedly a huge correlation between reading speed and standardized
test scores, like the SAT/GRE/GRE, which while not the point of this article
is still a powerful argument for reading books as a kid. And, this could be
any book, it just matters that you're practicing reading.

~~~
baccheion
This could make sense. The hardest part of the English SAT section was my
abysmally slow reading speed.

------
solipsism
I'll be the devil's advocate. There's this idea out there that you should get
your kids reading, no matter what they read. I see the idea expressed here,
and I see it expressed in my kids' school.

I wonder what that idea is based on. Any actual experimental studies that
imply a causal link between any kind of reading and intelligence or success or
some such metric? Anything to show how a heavy-reading childhood compares to a
heavy-videogames childhood?

The answer is of course no. You can't run such a study and have it be
experimental. So I'm extremely skeptical of this idea.

Not that I keep books from my children. Reading is one of life's great joys,
and that's enough of a reason to encourage it, in my opinion.

------
cimmanom
How much of this is simply attributable to parents who love to read
inculcating their kids with a love of reading -- as opposed to the presence of
the books themselves?

~~~
innocentoldguy
I would say it is entirely parents inculcating a love of reading in their
children. Kids could live in a library, but if they never read they wouldn't
receive any benefit from their environment. That was the issue I had with the
article. The author wrote it in a way that suggested the mere presence of
books produced an effect. I believe the presence of books offers no benefit
whatsoever unless kids read them.

------
wedge14
How would growing up in a household with only ebooks, or a household with only
physical books make a difference? (Assuming an equal number of both)

~~~
wedge14
Perhaps completely irrelevant as long as an equal number are read?

~~~
arkitaip
Maybe, maybe not. These social studies are so poorly executed that you're just
waiting for them to be debunked.

------
chiefalchemist
This feels like another version of nature vs nurture. That is, if your parents
had books, lots of books, there's probably a reason(s) for that.

I would think, the ultimate study would be of adopted and/or children who do
not share DNA with their parents, or other siblings. Is the environment an
equalizer, so to speak?

This is certainly interesting, but it's more correlation than cause.

------
jdlyga
Definitely. When I was little, my parents had this amazing book about each of
the planets in the solar system from the late 80s. It had all these
theoretical paintings of what the surface of each planet looks like (or the
interior of Jupiter). I didn't understand the science since it was more adult-
focused. But it was definitely good to have around.

~~~
kirsebaer
National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe (1980). I loved that book as
a kid!

------
lowdest
I was fascinated by D&D rulebooks when I was a kid. The systems captured my
imagination as much as the fantasy aspect. Because of that, my vocabulary
included excellent words like "melee", "flail", and "barrage" while I was
still in the single digits of age.

------
baccheion
Wide availability of access to the internet could have a similar effect,
unless time is mostly spent on sites like Facebook. Reading became a lot
easier (wouldn't space out) once taking acetyl L-carnitine + alpha-GPC. SEMAX
+ selank + alpha-GPC is even better. Iodine protocol.

------
codethief
> Respondents, who ranged in age from 25 to 65, were asked to estimate how
> many books were in their house when they were 16 years old. The research
> team was interested in this question because home library size can be a good
> indicator of what the study authors term “book-oriented socialization.”
> Participants were able to select from a given range of books that included
> everything from “10 or less” to “more than 500.”

In order words, they just used the number of books as an indicator that very
likely correlates with how much people used to read as kids, how many books
their parents could afford and how much their parents cared about education
and so on. If you accept this correlation, the results of the study become
somewhat trivial.

It's amazing how the people at Smithsonian Magazine maganaged to spin this as
a causal relationship, though, in the sense of "Just surround yourself with
books and it'll have a powerful, lasting effect on your mind." Relevant xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/552/](https://xkcd.com/552/)

------
tryauuum
maybe being surrounded with 350+ books correlates with rich parents. And rich
parents have an opportunity to pay for higher education for their children.

------
resalisbury
Growing up in homes advantaged enough to have large libraries could indicate
you are, in fact, advantaged!

------
resalisbury
I could just say correlation != causation and move on.

...but I thought I would at least give it 5 minutes of googling.

Here's the first randomized controlled trial I could find testing whether
access to libraries had any impact on literacy. TLDR (for this one study):
access to libraries does not improve literacy.

"We conduct a randomized controlled trial of an Indian school library program.
Overall, the program had no impact on students' scores on a language skills
test administered after 16 months. The estimates are sufficiently precise to
rule out effects larger than 0.053 and 0.037 standard deviations, based on the
95 and 90 percent confidence intervals. This finding is robust across
individual competencies and subsets of the sample. The method of treatment,
however, does seem to matter--physical libraries have no effect, while
visiting librarians actually reduce test scores."

I will repeat the last line "visiting librarians actually reduce test scores."
That seems counter intuitive. Maybe we should write articles w/ titles
"LIBRARIES INCREASE ILLITERACY." That would be a dump article to write, but
only slightly more dumb than the current article ;)

[https://www.nber.org/papers/w18183](https://www.nber.org/papers/w18183)

p.s. I like libraries.

------
nsomaru
Obligatory Schopenhauer:
[https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter3.html)

On reading and books.

------
jondubois
I never enjoyed reading fiction. Fiction trains your mind to look for
fictitious narratives in real life; it distorts your perception of life and
makes the world a worse place for others who don't follow those narratives.

~~~
wenc
Fiction certainly can have that downside.

But good fiction is also one of the most effective ways--apart from deep
listening--of training empathy because it lets you step into someone's inner
life. Rarely do we get a chance to see the world through someone else's eyes
for long stretches.

If you're not an immigrant, you can vicariously live the life of one through
fiction and see what they have to deal with.

If you're not a news reporter or a cop or a tycoon during the Great
Depression, you can tag along with one through fiction.

The point of reading fiction isn't about content, but how they change you as a
person.

~~~
sp332
I might think that of biography, or autobiography. But fiction writers often
don't know what it's like to be that sort of person, they just make it up.

~~~
veebat
This is kind of analogous to photorealism versus cartooning. A history or
biography would attempt to adapt events and experiences directly to the page:
"this happened, and then this happened, and it felt like that". Fictional work
transforms those same elements into exaggerated characters and scenarios. Both
kinds of works require some creativity to build up a coherent story, but
fiction has a freer hand to manipulate elements and choose its focus.

Just making it up without adapting from anything real usually isn't something
that good fiction is built up from, though. That path goes directly to cliche,
and it's easy to find cliched fiction.

