By Steve Sailer
05/23/2008
Tyler Cowen points out that in the Nation of the Future:
"Most Brazilians do not read. I don’t mean they can’t read, I mean they don’t read for leisure so much. I was stuck at the Sao Paulo airport for seven hours and did not see a single person reading a book, not once."Various commenters chime in with similar stories.
Personally, I have one regular correspondent who used to live in Brazil, but he’s of Dutch background and now lives in Canada. In contrast, I have quite a few correspondents from Finland, a country with a few percent of Brazil’s population. Granted, most younger Finns are literate in English, while most Brazilians are not, but still …
Here are some amazing statistics from the big PISA international achievement test of 15 year olds in 2000 (Figure 2.3):
In Brazil, only 4% of the youths read at one of the two highest levels on a six point scale, versus 33% in the USA and 50% in top-rated Finland. Brazil is even worse than Mexico, where 7% can read at a strong level.
Brazilians, however, seem to enjoy themselves.
I suspect the future will look more and more like a combination of Brazil and the old Ottoman Empire.
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