Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
A room without books is like a body without a soul,” observed the Roman philosopher, Cicero. It can also be a sign of financial hardship to come.
New research has uncovered a strong correlation between the earnings of adults and whether they grew up surrounded by books as children.
Three economists at the University of Padua – Giorgio Brunello, Guglielmo Weber and Christoph Weiss – studied 6,000 men born in nine European countries and concluded that children with access to books could expect to earn materially more than those who grow up with few or no books.
They studied the period from 1920 to 1956, when school reforms saw the minimum school leaving age raised across Europe. They looked at whether, at the age of 10, a child lived in a house with fewer than 10 books, a shelf of books, a bookcase with up to 100 books, two bookcases, or more than two bookcases.
