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.