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Comment by LeroyRaz | Hacker News Reader

The state has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the whole country (28%). To me, that implies they have some issue of governance.

Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy...

To be fair in the comparison, the literacy statistics for the whole of the US are pretty shocking from a European perspective.

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The data you're showing doesn't appear to differentiate between "Can read English" and "Can read in some language". Big immigrant population, same with New York. Having grown up in California I can tell you that there aren't 28% of kids coming out of public school who can't read anything.

Edit to add: my own hometown had a lot of people who couldn't speak English. Lots of elderly mothers of Chinese immigrants whose adult children were in STEM and whose own kids were headed to uni. Not to say that's representative, but consider that a single percentage stat won't give you an accurate picture of what's going on.

Not being able to read English in the US is bad though. It makes you a very inefficient citizen even though you can get by. Being literate in Chinese and not being able to read or even speak English is far worse than an illiterate person that can speak English in day to day interactions.

which is why the statistics need to be careful annotated. lacking literacy at all is a different dimension than lacking fluency the national lingua franca

The US has no official language. There are fluency requirements for the naturalized citizenship test, but those can be waived with 20 years of permanent residency. Citizens are under no obligation to be efficient for the sake of the government.

Yes, there is no official language. There is also no official rule that you shouldn’t be an asshole to everyone you interact with.

It’s still easy to be a shitty member of a community without breaking any laws. I would never move to a country permanently regardless of official language status if I couldn’t speak the language required to ask where something is in the grocery store.

The California tech industry will solve any concerns with this, we'll have Babelfish soon enough.

Did you go to school in Oakland or Central Valley? That’s where most of the illiterate children are going to school. I’ve never heard of a Chinese student in the US growing up illiterate, even if their parents don’t know English at all.

South Bay. And I didn't specify but I meant that the people who immigrated from abroad were not English speakers - younger than 50 or so even if born abroad all seemed to be at least proficient in English.

We had lots of Hispanic kids but not many who were super super fresh to the country. I'm sure the central valley was a whole different ball game.

For any others reading this, the _illiteracy_ rate is 23.1% in California according to the parent's source. This is indeed the highest illiteracy rate in the US thought.

Having said that, I would have thought this was partially a measure of migration. Perhaps illegal migration?

The "medium to high English literacy skills" is the part that is important. If you can read and write Chinese and Spanish and French and Portuguese and Esperanto at a high level, but not English at a medium to high level, you are 'illiterate' in this stat.

Maybe there is something missing from your analysis? By most metrics the US compares quite favorably to Europe. When you see something that seems like an outlier, perhaps turn down the arrogance and try to understand what you might be overlooking.

I don't know what your source for "by most metrics" is?

As I understand it, the US is abysmal by many metrics (and also exceptional by others). E.g., murder rated and prison rates are exceptionally high in the US compared to Europe. Homelessness rates are exceptionally high in the US compared to Europe. Startup rates are (I believe) exceptionally high in the US compared to Europe.

There's a huge problem trying to do cross-jurisdiction statistical comparisons even in the best case. Taking literacy as the current example, what does it mean to be literate, and how do you ensure that the definition in the US is the same as the definition in the UK is the same as the definition in Germany? And that's before you get to confounding factors like migration and related non-English proficiency.

It's fun to poke at the US, I get it, but the numbers people love to quote online to win some kind of rhetorical battle frequently have little relationship to reality on the ground. I've done a lot of travel around the US and western Europe, and I see a lot of ups and downs everywhere. I don't see a lot of obvious wins, either, mostly just choices and trade-offs. The things I see in Europe that are obviously better almost 100% of the time are a byproduct of more efficient funding due to higher density. All kinds of things are doable in the UK, for example, which couldn't really happen in (for example) Oregon, even though they have roughly the same land area. Having 15x as many taxpayers helps.

The issue of governance is the massive hole in the US - Mexico border. Why California's government isn't joining the ranks of Texas, Arizona, etc, I cannot understand.

Source: my mom was an adult ESL / Language / Literacy teacher.

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