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Is the decline of reading making politics dumber?
- pseudolus 1y agohttps://archive.ph/tjo6Y https://archive.ph/tjo6Y
- techpineapple 1y agoI wonder if politics is a top line issue or a bottom line issue. Teenagers never seriously paid attention to politics when I was a kid, now everyone does. So are people really getting dumber or are dumber people getting into politics.
- samt 1y agoPor que no los dos? (why not both)
- acdha 1y agoWe certainly did when I was a kid towards the end of the Cold War, but it was moderated by the major players serving broad audiences so they tended not to knowingly repeat falsehoods and the biases were more subtle such as selecting which stories got more coverage. It certainly wasn’t perfect but things like keeping advertisers happy tended to cut against putting conspiracy theorists and fabulists on prime time. Talk radio and then cable news really ushered in the political entertainment era where what matters most is whether a story feels right for a narrow audience, and then the internet provided the amped up version. I wouldn’t say dumber as much as provocative but once the ad-tech engines started rewarding hot takes they became predominant.
- jltsiren 1y agoThat goes in cycles. Some generations are more politically active than others, as young people tend to find their own things to do. The late 60s and most of the 70s were politically pretty active, as there were a lot of young people and the society was changing rapidly. 1968 was probably the year of peak youth activism, both in the Western and the Soviet blocks.
- morkalork 1y agoI wanted to say something about the youth vote back then and how they've changed since but it doesn't sound like they have at all. In 1972 Nixon won their votes and they're the boomers voting for the same dumb politics as today, reading and phones/internet be damned: https://archive.ph/qW2iE https://archive.ph/qW2iE
- corimaith 1y agoThe latter. Because it's better to not know something and know that you don't, than to confidently misunderstand something. And Teenagers have alot of ego that admitting being wrong or misled can be hard for them, even internally.
- arkis22 1y agowell dumber people are getting into politics because gerrymandering is getting worse. the case where politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around leads to worse overall outcomes because the seats are "safe" from the other party and competition. without competition quality falls
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoGerrymandering is only possible to such an extent now because everyone now has such strong partisan affiliation that their voting patterns are easily predictable. 95% of the population as soon as they see R or D by the name look no further. That’s also why we don’t have many centrist candidates anymore, they lost the ability to pull from the other side and they have a disadvantage within their own party.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoThe entire mainline democratic party is the centrist party
- themafia 1y agoI think for B.S. to stand up in print it needs to be fairly well crafted. I think the modern era has made throw away B.S. far more effective. I don't think the total ratio of B.S. has actually changed all that much.
- jdhendrickson 1y agoIf you are in the USA and don't believe the ratio of bullshit to reality has changed, I would like to know what news sources you are using.
- makeitdouble 1y agoWhile I get the sentiment, the US led a 7 year invasion war in Iraq based on pure bullshit allegations. It wasn't the same bullshit, and it might not have been so in your face in day to day life, but I'd argue it was just as bad.
- lovich 1y agoYea but that could be traced to specific individuals just lying(where that blame lands depends on your political preference) There’s definitely an increase in just basic disconnect from reality type discourse.
- makeitdouble 1y agoA few individuals lying wouldn't fly if the general public didn't buy/turn a blind eye on it. Apart from the few who still straight believed the bullshit while every other country involved publicly called it, I think many in the US just believed it would benefit them in the long run (cheaper oil) or just didn't care that much about war (the Gulf War didn't cause that much political trauma after all)
- lovich 1y ago> A few individuals lying wouldn't fly if the general public didn't buy/turn a blind eye on it. It wasn’t a blind eye for years. The public was more trusting of institutions back then and it took a while of failed answers and excuses and then finally investigations and leaks for people to finally believe that their government lied to them. It was a lot easier to believe that either you didn’t have all the facts or that was a mistake had been made vs believing that the institutions were actively, maliciously, telling falsehoods
- hx8 1y agoYes, both the reduction in the amount of reading and the reduction in the complexity of the average read text is leading towards a decline in cognition. Less than half of American adults have read a book in the last year, and younger people are reading less books[0]. The empirical evidence for cognitive benefits of reading books is so numerous and obvious that citing sources feels silly. Reading increases vocabulary, which are the building blocks that ideas are formed. This alone would be worth the time cost but reading also increases concentration, improves memory, and reduces cognitive decline. Reading books is roughly the same level of benefit as exercise. [0] https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-...
- dundercoder 1y agoWe don’t let our kids on to TikTok, but all their friends are on and it surprises me how much they take whatever advice is shown them as gospel. Lucky for me my kids will tell me “Hey, Johnny said the best way to get ripped is X” so I get the chance to teach proper research techniques (for the level they are at). Two of my four kids are avid readers, mostly fiction but some not, the other two I am really struggling to get them engaged. After being forced to read books in high school over the summer (school mandated summer reading) I got turned off on reading for years until I picked up Harry Potter. That changed my perspective and I read gobs of books now. I actually prefer to read information mostly than to watch a video about it.
- sotix 1y agoHigh school also killed my love for reading. I really regret that I didn't start reading again outside of assigned works until I graduated college. Now I read a pretty significant amount, and it's a joy to me! Something about how school analyzed literature and required you to read what they dictated didn't align with me. I just finished the Odyssey, a required book in high school, after I previously finished the Iliad, which wasn't required in high school. Reading those two together after reading Stephen Fry's Mythos and Heroes books was a wonderful experience that I felt could have been replicated in high school rather than the whirlwind of bouncing around to unrelated books like the Catcher in the Rye.
- arkis22 1y agoMamdani was largely propelled by disillusionment of the young who then voted for him. They listen to the headline political message and they don't understand the underlying principles, his policies will not make them better off. But he'll try and fail, and then they'll just increasingly think the system is broken. If they read more they would understand that. It's the same thing that propelled Trump into office
- dmbche 1y agoHumor me - concisely, what's so blatantly bad and failure prone about hos policies? Self evident enough that had the youngsters "read past the outline" they would have had to have got?
- arkis22 1y agorent control just limits supply. city owned grocery stores is a huge capital and organization outlay just to save 2% margin with a huge opportunity cost. at least he backed down from defunding the police. the socialist democratic organization he belongs to hasnt though
- anonymous_user9 1y agoI think you're exaggerating his policies. He's not proposing "rent control", he's saying he won't raise the rent on existing rent-stabilized apartments. To conclude that limits supply assumes that all the extra money would be invested into new construction. Likewise, he's only proposing a pilot program with five grocery stores, which isn't a huge capital expenditure for a large city.
- arkis22 1y agoYou literally just described rent control. That's kind of a joke right? it's a pilot program for 5 grocery stores? he wins votes off something that is something you admit is so inconsequential, while spending political capital to do it instead of other things? 2% margins baby
- siliconc0w 1y ago[flagged]
- torben-friis 1y agoThat would be exploitation of an existing problem. Trump as a phenomenon has famously baffled many countries who aren’t able to understand his appeal.
- krapp 1y agoI'd argue it started with Kennedy, when politics started to become more about celebrity than policy. Trump was definitely an inflection point, though. But he's a symptom of a bigger disease.
- diego_moita 1y agoSilvio Berlusconi, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Rodrigo Duterte, Tercep Erdogan, ... they all came before Trump. They all were equally stupid. Even Trump-like demagogues like Jair Bolsonaro and Nigel Farage already had a political career before him. What is new isn't that politicians got dumber, it is that the dumbest of them got the megaphones of social media.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoHe certainly didn't invent it but has been the most successful.
- catlover76 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- catlover76 1y ago[dead]
- erulabs 1y agoThe article does mention Trump by name and additionally provides anecdote and data showing this trend is not new. Some irony here, re: reading comprehension.
- diego_moita 1y agoYes: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death * https://ia800101.us.archive.org/27/items/Various_PDFs/NeilPostman-AmusingOurselvesToDeath.pdf https://ia800101.us.archive.org/27/items/Various_PDFs/NeilPo...
- KittenInABox 1y agoIt isn't clear to me that one is causal to the other. It uses for example the top NYT bestseller books sentence complexity. But that might mean that the media ecosystem is intentionally pushing simpler books, as we know the bestseller list is very often gamed by moneyed interests and industry pushes.
- dehrmann 1y agoEvery election, while I'm working on filling out my sample ballot, I visit the candidates' websites to see what they claim to stand for. Almost without exception, there's never any depth or nuance to their stances, and it's sprinkled with fearmongering dog whistles. Politics is dumb because the electorate lacks a deeper understanding of policies and tradeoffs, so shallow, partisan takes win elections. The problem isn't that a Dickensian metaphor went over the heads of college literature students; it's that practically all the information most adults consume is intellectual junk food, and people aren't used to challenging their views or taking on different perspective.
- Taek 1y agoI would say it's a different problem. The winner is pretty much always the candidate that gets the most eyeballs. A voting based political structure is fundamentally deeply biased towards visibility, and candidates that can get bigger reach with their message will get more votes independent of how low quality that message is. That has caused all popular vote based politics around the entire planet to converge on simple, viral messaging, and inflammatory messaging tends to be more viral. The other way to phrase it would be to say that popular vote systems hold politicians accountable to the number of eyeballs their antics reach, and we need to switch to a system that holds politicians accountable to the success of their policies.
- Whoppertime 1y agoI'm not sure that Biden had more eyeballs in 2020 but this seems generally true
- hamza_q_ 1y agoIt's remarkable that Marshall McLuhan's ideas haven't entered the public conscience yet.
- mapontosevenths 1y ago53% of American adults read below the sixth grade level. No idea that requires more than a sixth grade education will ever be mainstream again. Huxley was right.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIt’s been a long time, if ever, that people voted for ideas. They vote for party, as they always have, or for a charismatic candidate.
- yencabulator 1y agoBlame that one on the US two-party system. Multiple parties means you can have okay-ish feelings about 2-3 of them, and support people based on their ideas.
- croon 1y agoWhile genuinely a sad statistic, should it still be called "sixth grade level" at that point if less than half of adults, much less 12 year olds actually reach it? I mean it should because it should be a reasonable level to reach were it not for the dismantling of the educational system, but apparently it's not.
- mapontosevenths 1y agoI think this is a reasonable question. However, I would argue that it still should be. Firstly, I should say that reading scores aren't typically measured by grade levels for this type of study. That's just a colloquialism we use to make it comprehensible to the average person. The PIAAC for example uses a numerical score that translates to "levels of competency". [1] Still, I think it's still a valuable way to express the idea. There exist levels beyond the sixth. Even if most folks don't attain those higher levels anymore we do need some way to refer to them and the sixth grade is when a high school bound adult should have attained that level in order to keep up with later coursework. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/ https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/
- m-s-y 1y agoNo, it’s the paywalls. Can’t read what we can’t see.
- senectus1 1y agothats a different problem. Still a problem tho.
- raincole 1y agoYou know books cost money too, right? If people are reading less now than they did in 1980, clearly it's not because of the paywalls. Reading is one of the few things that got cheaper and cheaper if you count inflation. It's quite the opposite: we have way more free entertainment than before.
- jakarnet 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't post flamebait on HN or use the site for ideological battle. It's not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133741 and marked it off topic.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoThis may be more symptom than disease. It's not like Dickens is a going to be more effective at teaching critical thinking or geopolitical awareness than a spoken lecture or debate. It's just that in place of casual reading people choose brain rot, not because of the reading but because of the stimulation.
- nomilk 1y agoMany mainstream headlines are predicated on false assumptions. I read fewer books now days, but I read more overall, it's just off screens rather than paper. I recently went on an analogue book binge, and discovered something I'd not previously noticed. Possibly for commercial reasons, books tend to frequently be much longer than they need to be, (coincidentally) they're often a minimum of 200-250 pages. Books that could easily have their content conveyed in 25 or 50 pages will be padded to 200. And not just literary trash (of which there's a lot) but books that are highly recommended reading. Another big disadvantage of books is you receive exactly 1 perspective. Whereas if you actively research a domain with web access, you can cross reference and absorb a variety of contrasting (/conflicting) sources, and by smashing the ideas together enough, you can figure out which arguments are strongest. I'd also argue the study mentioned in the article is unfair. Not understanding English from the early 1800's doesn't make you an idiot; a lot of the context and literally the words and language itself are very different to modern English. I can sometimes more easily understand written Greek, Spanish or French (I don't speak any of those languages) than old English.
- raincole 1y agoYeah. Take this very article for example. The title: > Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? And the only parts where the author justified the title are: > At its simplest, Athenians in the fifth century BC could begin to practise “ostracism”—voting to banish people by writing their name on ostraka, scraps of pots—because, as William Harris, an academic, points out, they had achieved “a certain amount of literacy”. And: > We also analysed almost 250 years of inaugural presidential addresses using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. George Washington’s scored 28.7, denoting postgraduate level, while Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, the reading level of a high-schooler. I don't know, man. I found this super unconvincing. Were Athenians reading more than modern citizens in developed countries? Is "ostracism" even a good way to run a country? Do we want presidential addresses to be harder to read? Especially when we're comparing to Washington, who came to power in an era when the general population didn't vote for president? It's almost like the author is appealing to confirmation bias. Surely we intuitively think the decline of reading makes politics dumber. So the author doesn't even bother to support their claim. Just throw in some random examples off the top of their head and call it a day. Our knee-jerk reaction is Tiktok = information junk food. But isn't this article, printed on The Economists, simply less-digestible junk food?
- bell-cot 1y agoAdmitting that a copy of Dickens' "Bleak House" rests its worthy spine but a few feet from my own humble desk. And that I find that weighty tome's opening paragraphs to be a classic Dickensian wall of words - which only some might appreciate to be a complex and subtle mosaic of myriad parts of Her Majesty's English*, brilliantly arrayed upon the page as brightly colored marbles might be affixed to the full expanse of a beloved garden wall. If, I will confess, rather longer and taller than the entirely practical need of such a wall, in and of itself, might be. Such now said, and more to the point at hand - instead of the causality suggested by the article's title, I'd look for a common cause. When most of the population feels that their present circumstances have fallen far from their hopes of yesteryear, and their future prospects growing ever bleaker, then they neither spend time appreciating long and clever written works, nor gravitate toward wise and foresighted political positions. Humans really ain't at their best when they're running angry, anxious, and scared. *Mr. Dickens wrote almost entirely during the reign of Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India. And it definitely shows.
- lordnacho 1y agoIt's marketization, the decline is a symptom. People like the dons mentioned in the article used to resist dumbing down the curriculum. "Read the complicated text, or you don't get a degree. I don't care if you think it's harsh, and I don't care if none of you can do it." Now, you want to be a popular don, don't you? Wouldn't want a negative review. What do the customers think? Oh, they're used to a diet of intellectual junk food. Not much point in serving them literary vegetables, then. Politics is the same. There has been a complete breakdown of the feedback loop of proposing new legislation and then looking at the results. That sort of thing takes attention. But it's hard to do, you know? Just give me soundbites, so I can point my finger at my least favorite politician. This has rotted both the voters and the journalists. If we're going to let everything be decided by money, the money needs to reward good behaviors.
- southernplaces7 1y agoFor one thing, while not everyone reads novel-length tracts or deep introspective literature, today, a vastly greater number of people than ever in history are able to read, and daily do indeed read a considerable volume of words, ranging from the banal to the entertaining to the modestly intellectual and beyond. The evidence that this reading, even if much of it is short and very succinct, is somehow worsening cognitive performance than reading fewer things but of greater length, is shaky at best so far. Secondly, having more people than ever be able to read is still better than having a small percentage of the population be literate and reading deeply, while a vast majority can read barely anything or nothing. Since all declines have to be measured against some baseline or relative to some historical level, I have a hard time believing that there is even a decline of reading or anything making politics much dumber given that at any previous time, it was the case that fewer people read. If anything, the seemingly more intellectually robust political discourse preserved to now from history represents a minority of all (mostly blathering) political discourse, and even in the case of that limited quantity of reasoned discourse, was aimed more at a limited audience of watchers, while completely excluding most people. Finally, having spent years reading about history and its political elements (and their typical discourse) from the time of Rome to the present, I see nothing to make me think it's been dumbed down. If anything, the political propaganda of earlier decades and centuries was absurdly stupid, pig-ignorant and hateful by modern standards, but worked better on its contemporary audiences, who had much less access to such a vast flood of information, than does modern political propaganda on modern audiences.
- bethekidyouwant 1y agoThis is really dumb was politics smarter in the 50s? Give me a fucking break.
- w0de0 1y agoEisenhower’s Farewell Address, 1961 (in which he coined the term “military-industrial complex”): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY
- lmm 1y agoDo longer sentences mean better ideas, or are they just circumlocutions and embellishments? I can certainly believe that today's readers demand shorter sentences and books that express their thesis clearly and simply. I would need more evidence to believe they're wrong to.
- raincole 1y agoI honestly believe the problem of books of our time is that they're still too long. By at least a factor of 2. Books are 200 pages long not because they have 200 pages of content to say, but because there is no business model for publishing physical books of 50 to 100 pages long. We see the more is better mentality everywhere in marketing. On Udemy, instructors flaunt how many hours of videos their courses have. On Steam, we see "X levels, Y different enemies, Z characters" all the time. In OP article: > Open the Victorian bestseller “Modern Painters” by John Ruskin and you will find that its first sentence is 153 words long As if this is a good thing.
- xnx 1y agoStrong cosign to this. You can't "monetize" a 70 page book. Unnecessarily long books are just as bad as 10 minute YouTube videos that could've been 90 seconds.
- croon 1y agoMy 7 year old told my 5 year old the other day that his teeth would fall out if he didn't brush his teeth twice daily. She's also said that the king has no power because we have a parliament and a PM and elections. You and I both know these are generally correct, but we also both know that they're not. I generally, without shutting her down, interject with nuances and exceptions and minute details and 5 minutes later they have both stopped listening, which is fine. Kids need clear simple truths and rules, even if there are exceptions. And as they get older, they can start learning the nuances and enjoy navigating the exceptions and maybe have ice cream late on a wednesday once in a blue moon, and their teeth wont fall out. If adults never grow beyond a binary mindset and demand shorter ideas despite this meaning incomplete or wholly broken ideas, we have already lost. It's no wonder selling simple solutions to complex problems is so successful in politics today, but you will never solve anything by lossily compressing complex reality into incomplete or wrong solutions. TL;DR: <Won't Fix>