Much of your thesis relies on the following: > If you are illiterate, the number one thing you can generally do to improve your life is learn to read. I agree

Much of your thesis relies on the following: > If you are illiterate, the number one thing you can generally do to improve your life is learn to read. I agree that this certainly holds true today, since our culture now uses reading through and through. But in the history of our species, literacy is the weird exception, not the norm. For your argument to hold, it needs to have been true when only, say, 3% of the population could read and write (basically, a proportion comparable to today's proportion of people who "know how to code"). This graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png) suggests that the comparable era may be sometime around the medieval period, and it's not at all clear that your thesis would obviously hold true then, when other skills (hunting, barrel making, blacksmithing, etc.) would be far more immediately remunerative. When books are scarce, and few of one's peers are literate, being literate will do far less to improve one's life.