Students have good reason not to read
I nevertheless recommend reading my new NYT essay about that reason
I have a new short essay in the opinion pages of the New York Times this morning. (That link will get you past the paywall.) I hope you’ll read it, share it, argue about it, make your children or students or employees or boss or whoever read it — you get the idea. The essay may be fairly short, but I worked hard on it — as did editors, fact-checkers, designers, etc. — and my earnings from this labor will help me pay the mortgage.
What follows is what used to be known, back in the DVD era, as a “bonus feature.” You would rent a copy of American Beauty or Talladega Nights, watch it, and then maybe watch the smaller movie they made about the making of the main movie. Or there would be deleted scenes. Or a blooper reel. This Substack post is like that. It’s for people who couldn’t get enough of the NYT essay and crave a smaller essay about it. (Though it turned out not to be smaller, like the somehow even longer version of Apocalypse Now included as a bonus on the DVD.)
Come to think about it, you only ever see this sort of metacontent with film. Movie people love to make movies about how they made their movies. But there are no songs tacked onto the end of “Exile on Main Street” about the recording of that album, no tiny paintings that offer a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a Georgia O’Keeffe orchid. You can read Ezra Pound’s notes on “The Waste Land,” but neither Pound nor Eliot wrote a poem about the revision process. Ordinarily, if you want content about a work of art, you need to switch genres: a movie about a great album, a book about a painting, a one-hour podcast about a book, a three-hour podcast about a significant tweet. But there’s nothing really stopping artists in more mediums from doing what movie people do. If you love a medium, just use it all the time, for every purpose. Don’t just call your mother; make her a movie. Get a production budget. Put out a casting call.
The context for my essay is the widespread reporting — in a much-read Atlantic article, but even more depressingly in the higher-ed press — that college students don’t/won’t/can’t read books and articles that haven’t been excerpted for standardized tests. Of course, a lot of people are mad about the Atlantic piece, because they’re mad at the Atlantic for unrelated reasons. But the article presents a generally true picture of the scholastic reading landscape. Every college and high school teacher I know is seeing the same thing. (OK, I know one who isn’t, but she teaches at an intentionally weird school.)
An essay rebutting the Atlantic article, written by a teacher who was interviewed for it, got some attention on Substack a couple weeks ago. Many people found this essay an enlightening correction of the record, but I thought the essay had major problems, beginning from the fact that the author complains that Atlantic articles are too long, yet her Substack piece was even longer than the article it responded to.
Above all, it was a classic of the “mad at the newspaper” genre, saying, more or less, “I, with my limited and self-serving perspective, know how this entire article should have been reported and written.” The author doesn’t just want to be quoted in the Atlantic; she wants to edit the whole magazine. (I’m intentionally not linking to her post.)
My NYT essay focuses on the cultural indicators that are shaping students’ picture of the knowledge-sector workforce they’re preparing to join. But there are some economic indications that support my argument about why students perceive that, in current cultural and economic conditions, they don’t need to read in college.
The economy may not literally run on vibes, but the miracle of the 21st century knowledge economy is that intangible structures have so much productive power. In his 2016 book, The Wealth of Humans (which I reviewed and used to argue for universal basic income), Ryan Avent argued that 21st century economic growth was driven not by technology or human labor but by social capital: the widely-shared beliefs and norms of a company, a city, or an entire society. Companies thrive in cities with high social capital, the “physical places within which workers can come together to swap culture and ideas,” Avent writes. Workers become productive when they join a firm with a strong culture. Companies become profitable when they operate in cities where other companies are already thriving.
The power of social capital means that New Yorkers aren’t productive because they work so much harder than people do elsewhere. Rather, it’s because the city’s business culture, including its density of opportunity, can amplify a small competitive advantage into huge profits. Getting rich in New York is comparatively easy. If you really want to prove that you’re talented and hardworking, go start an investment bank in Juneau.
I think Avent oberved the generative side of culture’s productive power. But many individuals and companies are recognizing this idea and assuming that means they can coast on others’ contribution to the culture.
The other day I showed my students this recruitment video for PwC Luxembourg, an instant classic in the corporate-cringe and vibes-economy genres:
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I asked the students if the video made them interested in one day seeking a job at this company. Opinions were mixed. A couple students said no, it made the company seem unserious (in a bad way). Another thought it made the company seem relaxed (in a good way).
The most crucial data point may be that none of these first-year, fresh-from-high-school students had previously heard of PwC, and now they all have. That may be all that matters.
The idea for my new essay came when I read about students using AI to summarize their reading assignments shortly after I read a Substack post by Aaron Long about Apple Intelligence. Aaron’s essay is very much worth a read:
I also want you to know that Jessa Crispin wrote a very good essay about why you should read even if it’s hard and won’t make you a better person for her Substack, The Culture We Deserve. Highly recommended:
Also recommended: my essay in the Times.