Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm delighted that my three boys and one girl have grown up or are still growing up in a house full of books in English, Chinese, German, and other languages. Sure enough, my oldest son makes a fine income as a hacker--but wait, I grew up in a house full of books too, and I've NEVER made as much money as he already makes.

A correlational study like this can't show us the path of causation, if any. Any behavior geneticist worth his salt would immediately ask, "Do the boys earn more as grown men because they had the home environment filled with books, or perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations?" And the answer to that question, of course, is both,[1] but anyway the genes will matter.

[1] http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf

There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.

Or higher social status being the result of having books and a good job.

> There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.

ISTR in the last few years seeing similar research that controlled for most typical measures of SES that are associated with positive outcomes (parents income, parents educational attainment, etc.) which found that growing up with more books in the home had a positive impact on a number of outcome measures (leveling off once at about 100 books.)

I suspect that there is some degree in which it is serving as a proxy for as-yet-unidentified socio-economic, genetic, and parenting style and parental personality traits, but I also suspect even once all those were identified and taken into account, simply having books handy has some positive effects.

I'm pretty sure the study controls for that. It's too obvious an important factor. They probably control for parental education level too.

>A correlational study like this can't show us the path of causation, if any.

I'd bet the causation is that wealthy people read.

Statistics never guarantee outcomes. Statisticly, men are taller than women, but still many are not.

That's not the point of tokenadult though. He's pointing out that if higher incomes and book reading are both caused by some third factor, encouraging more reading might not have the desired effect on income.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com