35 ms·

Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

119 points by bootload 10y ago

mianos 10y ago
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-imply-causation/ http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/09/correlation-does-not-impl...
- vixen99 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
erikb 10y ago
What about girls and books?
n72 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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. ;)
johngossman 10y ago
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."
asuffield 10y ago
Strongly correlates with socioeconomic status. This research is telling us: wealthy children grow up to be wealthy adults.
- yeahbutbut 10y ago
  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.
  - bpchaps 10y ago
    Yeah, that's the case with my family. I was in the "lower middle class" when growing up, but we had a library completely filled with books. Most of them were cheap, used books, or were just collected over the years. In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.
  - chongli 10y ago
    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.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > 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.
      - mercer 10y ago
        I'd very much appreciate it if both of you present some evidence, because I now realize my vague assumptions about this are not really based on anything...
tokenadult 10y ago
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
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- njohnson41 10y ago
  There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.
  - qb45 10y ago
    Or higher social status being the result of having books and a good job.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure the study controls for that. It's too obvious an important factor. They probably control for parental education level too.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status. ISTR in the last few years seeing similar research that controlled for most typical measures of SES that are associated with positive outcomes (parents income, parents educational attainment, etc.) which found that growing up with more books in the home had a positive impact on a number of outcome measures (leveling off once at about 100 books.) I suspect that there is some degree in which it is serving as a proxy for as-yet-unidentified socio-economic, genetic, and parenting style and parental personality traits, but I also suspect even once all those were identified and taken into account, simply having books handy has some positive effects.
Paul_S 10y ago
“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 10y ago
  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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
Unless they control for the heritability of intelligence this is a "wet streets cause rain" story.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Not to mention the heritability of economic status. Rich families have rich kids that grow up to be rich adults. News at 11.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    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)
    - aoeusnth1 10y ago
      Why not both? And are the scare quotes suggesting that intelligence isn't heritable?
    - ars 10y ago
      > 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 10y ago
        > 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.
stuxnet79 10y ago
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?
- josephjrobison 10y ago
  Totally agree with his from my own experience. Although I think it's a grass is greener thing. Now that I connect with my peers more often, I long for the solace of focusing on books!
- gambler 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Not disagreeing with you, but how do we consume the ideas and perspectives of people who don't write books?
  - wry_discontent 10y ago
    You definitely can watch tv in a more active way and see underlying themes in most shows, even if they're unintentional.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
eicossa 10y ago
> 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 ?
- golemotron 10y ago
  > Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable? IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder. The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.
  - light_hue_1 10y ago
    The idea that IQ is heritable, as in the genes from your parents have a substantial effect on your IQ (leaving aside diseases), is far from established and most cognitive psychologists would violently disagree. Any effect from your parent's genes is drowned out by socioeconomic status, the environment, pollution, time, education, etc. For example, the correlation between your IQ and your cousin's IQ is almost negligible (the correlation between your parents IQ and yours is a bit higher but still small) and something as pervasive as the Flynn effect is an order of magnitude more meaningful. It's not even clear how verifiable these correlations are because they tend to change substantially over time. If you don't believe me head over to your local university and talk to some of the faculty, see what they think. To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology. So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.
lpolovets 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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).
danieltillett 10y ago
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/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12307/abstra...
abalashov 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Pearls before swine, cargo cult, etc.
jbmorgado 10y ago
Causation VS Correlation... always a mystery to some minds.
davidf18 10y ago
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.
rrss1122 10y ago
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.

119 points by bootload 10y ago

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-imply-causation/ http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/09/correlation-does-not-impl...

vixen99 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

erikb 10y ago

What about girls and books?

n72 10y ago

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 10y ago
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. ;)

johngossman 10y ago

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."

asuffield 10y ago

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

yeahbutbut 10y ago
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.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  Yeah, that's the case with my family. I was in the "lower middle class" when growing up, but we had a library completely filled with books. Most of them were cheap, used books, or were just collected over the years. In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.
- chongli 10y ago
  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.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > 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.
    - mercer 10y ago
      I'd very much appreciate it if both of you present some evidence, because I now realize my vague assumptions about this are not really based on anything...

tokenadult 10y ago

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

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
njohnson41 10y ago
There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.
- qb45 10y ago
  Or higher social status being the result of having books and a good job.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure the study controls for that. It's too obvious an important factor. They probably control for parental education level too.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status. ISTR in the last few years seeing similar research that controlled for most typical measures of SES that are associated with positive outcomes (parents income, parents educational attainment, etc.) which found that growing up with more books in the home had a positive impact on a number of outcome measures (leveling off once at about 100 books.) I suspect that there is some degree in which it is serving as a proxy for as-yet-unidentified socio-economic, genetic, and parenting style and parental personality traits, but I also suspect even once all those were identified and taken into account, simply having books handy has some positive effects.

Paul_S 10y ago

“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 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago

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

ryandrake 10y ago
Not to mention the heritability of economic status. Rich families have rich kids that grow up to be rich adults. News at 11.
- andrepd 10y ago
  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)
  - aoeusnth1 10y ago
    Why not both? And are the scare quotes suggesting that intelligence isn't heritable?
  - ars 10y ago
    > 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 10y ago
      > 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.

stuxnet79 10y ago

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?

josephjrobison 10y ago
Totally agree with his from my own experience. Although I think it's a grass is greener thing. Now that I connect with my peers more often, I long for the solace of focusing on books!
gambler 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Not disagreeing with you, but how do we consume the ideas and perspectives of people who don't write books?
- wry_discontent 10y ago
  You definitely can watch tv in a more active way and see underlying themes in most shows, even if they're unintentional.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

eicossa 10y ago

> 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 ?

golemotron 10y ago
> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable? IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder. The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.
- light_hue_1 10y ago
  The idea that IQ is heritable, as in the genes from your parents have a substantial effect on your IQ (leaving aside diseases), is far from established and most cognitive psychologists would violently disagree. Any effect from your parent's genes is drowned out by socioeconomic status, the environment, pollution, time, education, etc. For example, the correlation between your IQ and your cousin's IQ is almost negligible (the correlation between your parents IQ and yours is a bit higher but still small) and something as pervasive as the Flynn effect is an order of magnitude more meaningful. It's not even clear how verifiable these correlations are because they tend to change substantially over time. If you don't believe me head over to your local university and talk to some of the faculty, see what they think. To round it all off. The correlation between IQ and anything useful like say.. income is absurdly weak and most of the correlation happens at the low end where it really accounts for people with some pathology. So no. It's not sad that people aren't being fed fake racist or sexist "facts" these days. It's good that we don't place value on things that don't matter and it's sad that people hold on to racist ideas from 100 years ago that have no basis in modern science.

lpolovets 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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).

danieltillett 10y ago

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/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12307/abstra...

abalashov 10y ago

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 10y ago
Pearls before swine, cargo cult, etc.

jbmorgado 10y ago

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

davidf18 10y ago

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.

rrss1122 10y ago

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.