On Sun, 19 Oct 2003, joanna bujes wrote:
> Doug wrote:
>
> "After we were on a panel together at CUNY a couple of weeks ago,
> Giovanni Arrighi told me that U.S. workers were more literate a
> century ago than today. I found that very hard to believe, but I
> didn't have the facts to make the argument. Does anyone here know
> about this?"
>
> I have no fact or figures. I had occasion to compare essays written by
> freshmen in the late seventies with essays written by freshmen in the
> fifties, and found that the earlier ones were much more articulate and
> better organized.
>
--The obvious confound here: a higher proportion of people went to college in the 70s than in the 50s. Differences in the quality of the essays could be due to selectivity. (Now that I think about it, perhaps this "ignorant youth" meme is nothing more than a base-rate fallacy?)
Miles