Literacy is declining rapidly in developed economies.

The following extract from PPI Trade Fact of the Week makes sobering reading. While the data is for the US, I am sure that it reflects similar trends in other wealthy nations, certainly anglophone ones.  The culprits of declining literacy are presumably attractive TV, movies and video games combined with lowering of scholarship standards by schools and parents alike.

The Numbers:

‘Literary reading’ rate of American adults, 1982: 57%

‘Literary reading’ rate of American adults, 2002: 47% What They Mean:

The release of PPI Trade Policy Director Ed Gresser’s first book, Freedom From Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy, comes in the midst of many alarming statistics about American reading habits.

• Reading rates are declining — The National Endowment for the Arts finds in a current report, To Read or Not To Read, that frequent readers are more likely to vote, participate in sports, visit museums and get high-paying jobs — but that with cable TV and internet competition, the rate of “literary reading” (i.e., reading books out of interest and for personal pleasure, rather than because one must read them for school or work) is falling in all American age-groups.
• Americans trail many Atlantic reading rivals — NEA’s 2004 report, Reading At Risk, found that only 57 percent of Americans had read at least one book in the previous year. This was well above the European Union’s 45 percent average, but behind Sweden’s 72 percent, Canada’s 67 percent, Finland’s 66 percent, and Britain’s 63 percent. More recently, Xinhua found China’s rate slightly behind the United States at just below 50 percent, and Latin American surveys suggest that Argentina’s average of four books a year isn’t far behind the 5.1-book figure for the United States. Other Latin countries are bit further behind, though, with Colombians at 2.4 books annually, Mexicans 2.9 and Brazilians 1.8.^*
• Printing and publishing employment are down — Book-printing has a claim to be America’s oldest manufacturing industry, launched with the Massachusetts Bay colony’s publication of The Whole Booke of Psalmes in 1640. Since 2001, employment in the publishing side of America’s book industry has fallen from 88,000 to 81,000, while book-printing employment has dropped from 38,000 to 30,000.

With all these grim facts in mind, buying books will evidently (1) raise one’s chance for high-wage employment, (2) help keep America’s book-printing workers at their jobs, (3) and help American readers stay ahead of China and France, while catching up with the Swedes, Finns, Canadians, and Brits. Readers elsewhere in the world of course have the opposite opportunity, to preserve a lead over the United States or catch up. Hint, hint.

^* France claims an average of seven books a year. But a French writer has recently written a best-seller boldly entitled “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.”