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

A government scheme is giving citizens cash for spending time with a good book.

We ask behavioural scientists, along with The Anxious Generation author and psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whether it’ll help make the habit stick 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.

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