Quote:
Originally Posted by wwmiv
Yes, and Austin is routinely in lists of most and least fit Americans. Two seemingly opposite things can be true…
1. Among the most educated.
2. Among the most illiterate.
… provided that the society consists of large groups of haves (fit or educated) and have nots (fat or illiterate), if there are relatively very few people in between (slim/slender/average or literate but not degreed).
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Illiterate in English. Literacy in this context is highly biased towards people that speak English fluently. The subtext of your comment suggested that you were using literacy as a proxy for educational attainment. That is clearly misleading since such a large percentage of New Yorkers do not speak English.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wwmiv
Furthermore, your about English language and literacy misses an important piece of the dynamic: many low income immigrants cannot read nor write in their own native language. I doubt that whether or not they can read or write in specifically English matters for the topline literacy numbers all that much.
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That's a fairly large leap you're making and I don't think you will find data to support that immigrants to the United States are commonly not literate in their first language. Immigrants overall tend to be multi-lingual, and even the ones that are only fluent in their dominant language will often have a basic grasp of English. OTOH, most native-born Americans will not have a basic grasp of any language other than English, no matter what their fluency level is in English.
According to Wikipedia, Latin American countries, which provide the lion's share of recent immigration to the United States, typically have slightly higher literacy rates than the United States. The U.S. reportedly hovers around 80% literate, while much of Latin America hovers above 85%:
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