Re:Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading...
by andyjohnson0 on Wednesday October 16, 2013 @10:15AM
(#6559737)
Stand-out quote for me:
"I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations."
See also the recent discussion on the possible role of literary fiction in assisting emotional insight, theory of mind, and empathy [1].
"I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.
It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations."
See also the recent discussion on the possible role of literary fiction in assisting emotional insight, theory of mind, and empathy [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6545881