[chongli]

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.

[barry-cotter]

The average American watches three hours of TV a day. They are not lacking for free time to read books if they wanted to.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watch...

[mgkimsal]

"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.

[chongli]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

> People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time.

Where did you get this idea? It's certainly not accurate in the US.

[mercer]

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...

[thaumasiotes]

https://dqydj.com/individual-incomes-versus-the-amount-of-ho...

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.

[ryanf]

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.