Decline In Handwriting And Postal Volume
Feb 12, 2016
Yesterday evening I was listening to a really cool Freakonomics podcast episode titled Who Needs Handwriting?. Stephen Dubner discussed the pros and cons of handwriting, its origins, and the emphasis it still receives in the high school system. Quite interesting.
I started to think that I use handwriting at work to draw schemas about the different pieces of a project or task that I need to accomplish, but it definitely has been a while since the last time I wrote a proper handwritten letter.
I wanted to check if there was data about postal volume, because I guess the decline in handwriting has an impact on these numbers. I found two interesting sources:
Both sites show a decline in the number of total mail sent. The decline is particularly dramatic after 2005:
