loss aversion

There's nothing new to say in any of these "Americans Can't Read" pieces, yet still I read them with morbid fascination. To zoom through the typical argument: if you count subtitled TikToks and Temu product descriptions, everyone still reads. It's just the novels and newspapers that are suffering. A literary elite reads more than ever thanks to e-readers and substack, but the global median trends downward. This is bad for our brains and our university professors' sanity, and portends a post-literate, thoughtless society. If we've passed peak literacy, we're still literate enough to consider this a universal problem. We still hold in our minds the idea that everyone ought to read, and ought to enjoy novels, and that this grants capabilities valuable for the flourishing of the society we want to live in. I note that there's a blindspot here. The counterfactual world where we felt this same way about maths, or computer programming, or herbalism, or animal tracking. I suspect there are…