The Economist published an article titled Is the Decline of Reading Making Politics Dumber? (4 Sept 2025).
« The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate. »
« YouGov, a pollster, found that 40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024. »
« Reading for displeasure is little better: as Sir Jonathan Bate, an English professor at Oxford University, has said, students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”. Even the educated young, another greybeard said, have “no habits of application and concentration”. »
« Sentences are getting shorter and simpler. We analysed hundreds of New York Times bestsellers and found that sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s. »
« This is not inherently a bad thing. Often simple prose is good prose, and few people have ever wished politicians’ speeches to be longer. »
« Professor Bate is more pessimistic. Lose the ability to read complex prose and he fears you may also lose the ability to develop complex ideas that “allow you to see nuance and to hold two contradictory thoughts together”. »
Articles of Interest 