Until last month, Paul Romer, chief economist at the World Bank, was best known for his brilliant research in the field known as “endogenous growth theory” - the idea that growth comes from the decisions made within an economic system rather than as a result of external factors.
Until last month, Paul Romer, chief economist at the World Bank, was best known for his brilliant research in the field known as “endogenous growth theory” - the idea that growth comes from the decisions made within an economic system rather than as a result of external factors.
Now, however, Romer is creating waves for a very different reason: he is waging war on how economists use the word “and”. Yes, you read that right. Last month, Romer sent an email to World Bank staff demanding that they tighten up their writing skills. In particular, he implored them to be more concise and clear when compiling reports, and to avoid creating hopelessly long, confusing documents crammed with lists of pious goals linked by that offending word “and”.
“Because of . . . pressure to say that our message is ‘this, and this, and this too, and that . . . ‘ the word ‘and’ has become the most frequently used word in Bank prose,” Romer complained. “To drive home the importance of focus,” he added, “I’ve told the authors that I will not clear [a] final report if the frequency of ‘and’ exceeds 2.6 per cent.” The 2.6 per cent goal came about because that was the pattern found in World Bank reports a few decades ago (though Romer says it was merely a symbolic threshold). In contrast, “and” has recently accounted for 7 per cent of all words used in the organisation’s reports.
Is Romer’s request reasonable? Not if you talk to many World Bank staff. Romer is not the first chief economist to create angst, but his demands have left some colleagues so incensed that he has been stripped of management control of the research division (Jim Yong Kim, World Bank president, wrote in a note to staff that another senior official would lead the Development Economics Group in order to create a stronger link between the Bank’s research and operational divisions, but that Romer would continue to provide “timely thought leadership on trends directly affecting our client countries”).
Personally, I am inclined to applaud what Romer has done. That 2.6 per cent threshold might seem bizarre; and perhaps it is a little unfair to focus on a single word. But speaking as someone who, in my work as a journalist, has been forced to read numerous official reports from bodies like the World Bank, I fully share Romer’s frustration with the impenetrable jargon that is bandied about.
It is not only multilateral organisations that fail in this respect. Last month, the veteran British journalist and editor Harold Evans published a guide to good writing, entitled Do I Make Myself Clear?, which identifies numerous examples of turgid and impenetrable prose from politicians, philanthropists, company executives and so on.
The kind of writing that Evans highlights is not merely irritating - it has serious, albeit subtle, implications. If official statements and documents are wrapped in layers of jargon, it becomes difficult for ordinary citizens to have any idea what is going on. And if voters are surrounded by baffling gobbledygook, they find it hard to trust what politicians are saying, or to take their utterances literally. One of the reasons for Donald Trump’s success as a politician is his blunt, no-holds-barred style of speech, which cuts through what Evans describes as the “endless fog” of linguistic complication. And while Trump’s words often seem contradictory, many voters simply ignore this fact - precisely because they have become so cynical about language.
Is there a solution? Evans’s book offers plenty of practical advice for those seeking to improve their writing skills, with a 10-point checklist to encourage a clear approach (tips include “Banish clichés” and “Don’t be a bore”).
It seems to be a message people want to hear: Do I Make Myself Clear? has just hit the New York Times bestseller list, which is startling for a book about language, grammar and “proper” writing. The big question now is how institutions such as the World Bank will respond.
Romer was not the first person to complain about the World Bank’s reports; a couple of years ago, academics at the Stanford University Literary Lab declared the Bank’s communications so “codified, self-referential and detached from everyday language” that they were in effect a “technical code”, dubbed “Bankspeak”.
But it was not until Romer arrived there last October that anybody tried to reform the language. And I suspect he only acted because he was new to the job and knew he could return to a tenured post as an economics professor if his war on “and” went awry.
Either way, Romer has no intention of abandoning his campaign. “There are many reasons why we must write clearly . . . it is a commitment to integrity,” he says. Indeed, he hopes this campaign will gather traction thanks to people such as Evans. “I can’t say enough about how much I admire Harry Evans and how important his new book is,” Romer told me. All eyes on the World Bank’s next Development Report.
