They could be a shelf full of $2 novels. Owning a few hundred books doesn't cost very much (thanks printing press), and only implies an interest in reading not in being of a high socioeconomic status.
Yeah, that's the case with my family. I was in the "lower middle class" when growing up, but we had a library completely filled with books. Most of them were cheap, used books, or were just collected over the years.
In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.
Owning books is not the hard part, it's reading them. Reading a novel takes a lot of time and is a singularly self-centered leisure activity. People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time. Heck, the image of a person lounging with a book has a very strong cultural link to (non-working class) status.
"leisure" was probably the wrong word, in context. The sort of 'leisure' (or pastime) of watching TV can be completely passive. One can 'watch' TV for 2-3 hours and literally not have to think about anything difficult. Reading a book is far more of an 'activity - requiring active thought processing - than TV watching. And for many people, reading a book is anything but pleasure.
My main argument is that reading books is the hard part. Leisure time is an example I gave of a contributing factor. There are other contributing factors, such as cultural ones, which I alluded to.
Beyond that, though, it's not merely the case of an individual having time to read. A parent who does not read to their child is raising a child to be less literate or even illiterate.
I'd very much appreciate it if both of you present some evidence, because I now realize my vague assumptions about this are not really based on anything...
The general phenomenon here is very well known; just searching around for this I found stuff like "UK time use data for the period 1961-2001 do indeed indicate a reversal of the previously negative leisure/status gradient". ( https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2005-... ). But that paper is obviously more concerned with the UK than the US.
Data on this is directly available from the American Time Use Survey, if you want to tabulate it yourself -- while they do collect various data on employment status, they don't publish a summary of time use by employment status.
It's weird to assume that all time spent outside a paying job is leisure time. People who have money can afford to spend a lot less time cooking, taking care of children and elderly parents, etc.
This makes me wonder if ebooks have the same effect --- because these days, owning a few thousand of them or more, although perhaps maybe not completely legally, is nothing more than the price of an Internet connection.
I too wonder about this. Having read from physical books most of my life and switching to ebooks/PDFs (reading from laptop or iPad) was not as fun/convenient as I thought it would be. Although saving resources, the feeling I get when holding a book and writing in it (jogging down thoughts or deriving equations) are irreplaceable by electronic files.
In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.