This article really piqued my interest, so I did some further research into these claims. - The source of the "illiteracy costs $2T/year": https://www.barbarab

This article really piqued my interest, so I did some further research into these claims. - The source of the "illiteracy costs $2T/year": https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/BBF_Annual_Report_2022.pdf https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/BBF_A... - Literacy is a global problem. There are myriad reasons why people don't learn how to read. It is very difficult to learn _anything_ when your housing is at risk, for example. - Literacy in general is relatively new. We've been illiterate as a species for _way_ longer than we haven't, and reading/writing was an activity reserved for the elite for a long, long time. Literacy as a metric for social progress really started in the 1800s! - UNESCO is responsible for collecting global literacy levels, but countries can choose how this data is collected. Self-reporting is very popular, as you can imagine. (This is a catch-22; to participate in these surveys, you have to be able to read...) - The metric for how literacy was reported changed in the 2000s, and I'm not sure if data from prior years was normalized retroactively As an aside, I think _this_ is the biggest reason why photo and video based social media took off. 1 in 3 people can't read beyond a fifth-grade level. Reading is HARD for a lot of people.