>I don't think this is a great metric of literacy

That's like saying drinking water is not a great metric of hydration.

>For one not all books are exactly high quality, and now more than ever there's a plethora of non-book written content available to us.

Yes, I'm pretty sure those 50%+ of people who "didn't read a single book" did it to avoid all the less than high quality books, or because they were busy consuming high quality non-book written content online.

One of the smartest people I’ve met in my life is a plumber, who failed 5th grade and never went back to school. He can’t even read/write basic sentences in his native language and he can only speak one language, his native. Yet, he is able to figure out how to use all settings on smartphones on his own, plan plumbing for large properties, has high level people skills, is the president of his union etc. other than computers/scrabble, I am probably not even half as smart as this person, and I have a masters degree (for what it is worth).

All this to say, I don’t understand “number of books read” as a metric of smartness or literacy or intelligence. Maybe it is easier to survey this metric and collect data? Sounds lazy research to me.

There are more than enough ‘high quality’ books to fill a lifetime of reading…

Does it really matter what the exact percentage is? Try selling something on Craigslist anywhere but San Francisco (I'm guessing) and see how people will respond just to drop their phone number, expecting you to call them. In most cases they are unable or unwilling to proceed further except by phone call.

To a large extent, people are incapable of any kind of communication that involves lengthy text or even a paragraph. Especially anything involving critical thinking or careful parsing of details. Even this paragraph right here is way too much for many.

Want a real laugh? Try selling anything online anymore without posting pictures of it first. Doesn't matter what it is--NO takers. Nobody can read, visualize, or understand anything!

> the 54% doesn't include the 21% does it? otherwise no-duh 20% are below 5th grade, 21% in fact

No, not in fact. Literacy is typically defined to an age level. A third grader could be literate while an adult reading at their level is not.

I would love to see the sources for those statistics. I am not going to hold my breath.

The difference between fifth and sixth grade reading levels doesn’t have much to do with sounding out words.

Reading text aloud to the illiterate group is not sufficient to let them understand the material.

Arguably, an LLM could rewrite the content to target illiterate audiences.

chatgpt 4o mini did better with your comment than I’d guessed it would:

> With new tools that change speech to text and text to speech, many people might not need to read or write as much. If someone has to make an important paper, like a contract or a will, they will probably ask someone who knows how to do that.

> It's not clear if people who work in STEM (like science and math) can skip reading and writing. In STEM, they use many pictures, charts, and drawings to share ideas. While these don’t always use words, they often have things like math symbols or simple sentences to help explain.

I feel the sentence structures it chose are a bit too complicated for K-3rd grade level, which is what it should have targeted. Maybe some prompt engineering could get it to simplify further.

>With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population.

That's Idiocracy at play.

With AI they can dispense with thinking too. And with an Optimus robot they won’t even have to go to the store or leave the lay-z-boy, raw unprocessed beef fat can just be shovelled into their unthinking and illiterate mouths every waking hour by the droid.

Historically, 5 to 10% of the population have been the nobility, upper ranks of the clergy, and military officers and their families. Most of the rest has been the peasantry and landless workers with a small middle class of artisans and minor officials.

A great amount of inequality is normal. Only great wars and plagues achieve significant leveling of society.

Phone use has taken us 80% of the way there. It’s wild how correlated kids with phones (and teens with social media) is to parents’ income.

This is already the case

What metric would you use to define underclass that doesn’t already apply?

Would be cuter if the HVAC manual is in Chinese...

I wonder what the literacy level in China is like (% who can read at grade 5, 6, 12, etc, level)

This strikes me as a passive way of looking at it when the predominant situation is that administrators actively implement lower standards.

> Nobody has mentioned the dramatic increase of non-white immigrants and illegal aliens since 1985

Genuine question: do we have data for native-born non-Hispanic Americans?

This could be an artifact of immigration. Anecdotally, I think we have a divide driven by class-based device access (poorer kids are on their devices and social media more than rich kids and more than anyone was in the 80s).

In my experience of University much of student activism was done by students who struggled the most academically and often made it part of their agenda to ease academic standards.

> mentions Barack Obama in a survey of billionaires (he isn't)

This is hilarious in the context of an article about falling literacy.

They surveyed billionaires about “elite achievers.” Obama wasn’t surveyed, because as you point out, he isn’t a billionaire. Billionaires were surveyed about him.

No