A Cal Tech grad student put together a list of the most popular books across college campuses and then correlated those book choices with S.A.T. scores at those schools. His results reveal that the five books with the highest average S.A.T. scores are Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, Freakonomics, and Atlas Shrugged.
Among those five books, I have to admit that Lolita and Freakonomics are the only two I have read from beginning to end. I started the other three but didn’t manage to finish reading any of them.
The lowest five books in terms of S.A.T. scores are Zane (who is an author, not a book), The Color Purple, Fahrenheit 451, The Outsiders, and Addicted. The Holy Bible almost makes this category.
So which way is the causality running here? Does reading Crime and Punishment make you smart or do smart people read Crime and Punishment?
Unfortunately, I fear that it is the latter. Otherwise, can you imagine how many copies of Freakonomics we could sell? Every teenager needing a little S.A.T. score boost would make a trip to the bookstore and see that Freakonomics is 207 pages long and Crime and Punishment is over 700 pages. The choice would be easy.
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Atlas Shrugged being on that list made me laugh pretty hard. Kids may be smart enough to do well on the SAT but what a difference experience makes.
As an MSC student who just cant find the time to get around to reading Freakonomics despite a desire to, maybe reading it will boost my ability to cope with the workload.
And what experience is that J? Our wonderful welfare state?
Keep in mind that Ayn Rand thought Libertarians were idiots.
The people I knew in college that read Atlas Shrugged and actually enjoyed it were typically the dumbest ‘smart people’ around. It’s the literary equivalent of “Spot Goes to the Capitalist Saviours.”
Also interesting to mention is that the “Holy Bible” is correlated with being dumb, but just the “Bible” is decidedly middle of the pack, which may be the most revealing piece of information this correlation has to offer.
what’s the difference between The Holy Bible and The Bible? They’re both on the chart. Sounds to me like you were just trolling Mr. Levitt.
I particularly like the graph makes it look like kids with over 1350 don’t read anything.
–So which way is the causality running here? Does reading Crime and Punishment make you smart or do smart people read Crime and Punishment?
Maybe the answer is neither. I suspect many claim a book as a favorite, not because they read it and liked it, but because that book is a social indicator of something — like being smart or a philosophically appealing, etc.