Singapore Pays Citizens to Read — One Dollar at a Time
A new government scheme rewards reading time logged on an official website, part of what psychologists are calling a broader effort to counter a decline in reading for pleasure.
Singapore has launched a scheme that pays citizens for reading, according to the Guardian. Participants log their reading sessions on a government website; each session must last at least fifteen minutes, and only one can be counted per day. After fifty such sessions, a reader earns one Singapore dollar, or about £0.59.
The sums involved are negligible as an incentive on their own, but the Guardian reports that behavioural scientists and psychologists see value in the mechanism regardless — the habit of logging, they suggest, may matter more than the payout. Among those consulted was Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, who was asked whether such a scheme could help reading compete with phone use.
The initiative arrives against a backdrop the Guardian frames as a wider 'reading crisis': a 2024 study cited by the paper found that more than a third of UK adults had given up reading for pleasure altogether. Singapore's approach treats the decline as a behavioural problem to be nudged, rather than a cultural shift to be reversed by other means.
No further detail on the scheme's budget, duration or uptake was available in the material reviewed for this article.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
