There's nothing new to say in any of these "Americans Can't Read" pieces, yet still I read them with morbid fascination.

To zoom through the typical argument: if you count subtitled TikToks and Temu product descriptions, everyone still reads. It's just the novels and newspapers that are suffering. A literary elite reads more than ever thanks to e-readers and substack, but the global median trends downward. This is bad for our brains and our university professors' sanity, and portends a post-literate, thoughtless society.

If we've passed peak literacy, we're still literate enough to consider this a universal problem. We still hold in our minds the idea that everyone ought to read, and ought to enjoy novels, and that this grants capabilities valuable for the flourishing of the society we want to live in.

I note that there's a blindspot here. The counterfactual world where we felt this same way about maths, or computer programming, or herbalism, or animal tracking. I suspect there are few New Yorker writers who know how to program, so there aren't as many eulogies for this atrophying human capability, even though I have no doubts they would be accompanied by their own alarming neuroscience and test score crashes.

We don't often mourn the loss of a capability we never developed. Sometimes people regret not learning an instrument as a kid, but it rarely feels salient day-to-day that I'm lacking in appreciation for the abstract mathematical brilliance undergirding reality.

This is probably true of any intellectual specialization. Statisticians, musicians, physicists, mathematicians, historians, doctors - if I had to guess, they're all concerned by the second-order effects of thought delegation - it's just that reading & writing were once universal enough to be considered foundational for liberal society in a way that understanding physics never has been.

I'm not yet sure what to make of this. It's just something I try to keep in mind as we hem and haw about the future: there are selection effects at play to the crises we're concerned about, and loss aversion is a powerful cognitive bias.