I think there are four critical actions the community of bibliophiles could take that would materially enhance national bibliocentricity, increase diversity in books, and enhance life outcomes.
1. Focus on increasing bibliocentricity among all readers. 10% of the population is doing 80% of the reading. 50% read no books electively at all in a year. That 10% (which is predominantly concentrated in the upper three quintiles, i.e. overwhelmingly middle class), exert a disproportionate economic influence on the market for books (not said as a criticism, just an observation of reality). If all groups were to spend the same amount of time reading books and the same amount per household on books, the necessary consequence would be both an increase in demand for all books, and in particular a likely increase of more rarely represented characters (whatever the attribute such as race, ethnicity, orientation, gender, work structure, family structure, age, etc.) It is a general rule that the larger the pool of members in a population, the more variety is represented.
2. Support robust research into the causative, contributive, predictive, or determinative nature of childhood reading on life outcomes. There is an already well established link between enthusiastic childhood reading and vocabulary and between vocabulary and predicted academic achievement, and between academic achievement and income quintile (see Schoolbook Simplification and Its Relation to the Decline in SAT-Verbal Scores by Donald P. Hayes, Loreen T. Wolfer, Michael F. Wolfe.) and also the link between family bibliocentricity and desirable life outcomes (Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, Donald J. Treiman). What is missing is the role, if any, that stereotypes, content, style, etc. play in creating predictive desirable outcomes. Absent this empirical basis, recommendations lack any validity other than personal credibility which is not usually scalable.
3. Support robust research into the landscape of children’s books. It would be interesting to know, for example, whether there are real and material differences between the degree and nature of representativeness/stereotypes (in terms of all attributes; race, gender, orientation, age, religion, family structure, work ethic, etc.) for 1) bestsellers (reflects the market IS), 2) critically acclaimed (probably reflects the critically assessed OUGHT TO BE), 3) canon books that remain in demand on a multi-decadal basis (probably reflecting the vox populi cultural consensus of OUGHT TO BE), and 4) statistically representative random sample of all books published (includes all the books that are available but aren’t taken up by the reading audience in meaningful numbers and probably represents the available COULD BE). I am guessing that there are material differences between the four populations of books.
4. Create communities of interest around neglected attributes. As this group has proven time and again, it is usually pretty easy to construct fairly substantial portfolios of recommendations around particularly rare or underrepresented attributes and combinations of attributes. The books are out there, it is a matter of connecting supply with demand.
The Indian Nobel Economist Amartya Sen makes the case in his Argumentative Indian, particularly in the essay Class in India, that it is rarely a sole attribute which is usefully predictive of disparate outcomes, it is some combination of attributes. You have to look at the combinations to understand both causation and the real consequences. “Consider gender. South Asian countries have a terrible record in gender inequality, which is manifest in the unusual morbidity and mortality rates of women compared with what is seen in regions that do not neglect women’s health care and nutrition so badly. At the same time, women from upper classes are often more prominent in South Asia than elsewhere. Indeed, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have all had, or currently have, women Prime Ministers – something that the United States (along with France, Italy, Germany and Japan) has never had and does not seem poised to have in the near future.” [Note, the essay was based on a speech from 2001, Germany now comes off that list].
In other words, gender on its own is often not particularly usefully predictive of a disparate impact. You have to look at gender in combination with other factors to determine the consequence. Upper class women in India, on a global metric of equality are not faring so badly, in fact on some measures doing extremely well. Lower class, bottom caste women in India fare about the worst in the world in terms of equality and negative life outcomes. You can’t speak meaningfully (in terms of statistical probabilities of outcomes) of just gender or just class or just caste or just family structure. Different combinations have dramatically different outcomes. When you mix unlike statistical populations, you lose predictive capability.
Groups outside the middle class/intact family/upper three income quintiles are likely to be disparately underrepresented in children’s literature for simple supply and demand reasons that are not on their own bad reasons. For example, GLBT parents with young children represent perhaps 5-10,000 couples (using rough census numbers). Given that a mainstream book needs to sell roughly 5,000 books to be considered successful, that implies a 50-100% market penetration, a virtually non-existent occurrence among media and consumer product companies. A commercial publisher is likely, based on the smallness of the market and the difficulty of reaching that diffuse and widely dispersed market, to not take the risk against those odds. It is not a moral reflection on the publisher, simply a practical commercial and logistical issue facing small groups in large markets. When you combine this with other attributes (such as adoption, and interracial family) which are additional real but numerically few casas and I think it is clear that the real issue is 1) smallness of market size, 2) commercial risk, and 3) challenge of connecting what might be available to who might be interested.
But in such a rich environment of available stories, the rarer the combination of attributes, given the torrent of new and backlist books, the harder it becomes for consumer to find supplier. It seems to me that this is a market failure that some non-profit might be able to rectify by creating and maintaining booklists (or better, a searchable database by multiple attributes) pertinent to particular communities of interest to assist them in creating or rounding out their own portfolio of books which they would desire as the core of their bibliocentric life. To be clear, I am not advocating group isolationism. For example, probably 90% of what a GLBT couple with children deal with is simply what all parents deal with. Consequently the bulk of their child book portfolio is likely to consist of books common to all other generic parents. The challenge to the GLBT parents will be in finding, should they wish, those books that are specifically pertinent to their circumstances (GLBT parents and/or adoption and/or interracial family, etc.)
This can be done now with effort and diligence. But time, money and cognitive energy are all in short supply for parents. Could we create a collaborative central searchable repository of recommended books for all those attributes judged to be otherwise underrepresented (or too frequently misrepresented)? Entirely feasible were some foundation, or department to step up to the plate. Advantages? 1) It is a service to underrepresented communities, 2) As a single point of contact for dispersed and/or small communities, it might create greater commercial success for otherwise overlooked books, and 3) Such commercial success might in turn serve as a catalyst for authors and publishers to go where they currently commercially fear to tread.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment