Singapore is paying people to read books – can it fix the reading crisis?

Could the solution to the reading crisis lie in paying people to put down their phones and pick up a book? That’s what one government, at least, is resorting to: this month, Singapore launched a scheme promising actual cash to citizens as a reward for logging reading time on a government website.

It’s unlikely to make you megabucks – you have to rack up 50 reading sessions of at least 15 minutes to earn one Singapore dollar (£0.59), with only one logged session allowed per day. But behavioural scientists and psychologists told the Guardian such a scheme could still help boost a habit in precipitous decline.

Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist and the author of the bestselling book The Anxious Generation, about the impact of social media on young people’s mental health, says that some children are highly motivated by money, and “all kids respond to rewards to some degree” – so for young people, the scheme is “likely to have some beneficial effect in setting up a habit of reading”. Lory Barile, associate professor in economics at the University of Warwick, adds that “there is good evidence that repeating a behaviour consistently can help it become more automatic over time”.