TITLE: Using Programs and Data Analysis to Improve Writing, World Bank Edition
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 06, 2017  2:39 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Last week I read a tweet that linked to an article by Paul
Romer.  He is an economist currently working at the World
Bank, on leave from his chair at NYU.  Romer writes well,
so I found myself digging deeper and reading a couple of
his blog articles.  One of them,
<A HREF="http://wb-ce.org/writing.html">
   Writing</A>,
struck a chord with me both as a writer and as a computer
scientist.

Consider:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 The quality of written prose should be higher in
 documents that will have many readers.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

This is true of code, too.  If a piece of code will be read
many times, whether by one person or several, then each
minute spent making it shorter and clearer improves reading
comprehension every single time.  That's even more important
in code than in text, because so often we read code in order
to change it.  We need to understand it at even deeper level
to ensure that our changes have the intended effect.  Time
spent making code better repays itself many times over.

Romer caused a bit of a ruckus when he arrived at the World
Bank by insisting, to some of his colleagues' displeasure,
that everyone in his division writer clearer, more concise
reports.  His goal was admirable:  He wanted more people to
be able to read and understand these reports, because they
deal with policies that matter to the public.

He also wanted people to <EM>trust</EM> what the World Bank
was saying by being able more readily to see that a claim
was true or false.  His article looks at two different
examples that make a claim about the relationship between
education spending and GDP per capita.  He concludes his
analysis of the examples with:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 In short, no one can say that the author of the
 second claim wrote something that is false because
 no one knows what the second claim means.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

In science, writing clearly builds trust.  This trust is
essential for communicating results to the public, of course,
because members of the public do not generally possess the
scientific knowledge they need to assess the truth of claim
directly.  But it is also essential for communicating results
to other scientists, who must understand the claims at a
deeper level in order to support, falsify, and extend them.

In the second half of the article, Romer links to 
<A HREF="http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet9.pdf">
    a study of the language</A>
used in World Bank's yearly reports.  It looks at patterns
such as the frequency of the word "and" in the reports and
the ratio of nouns to verbs.  (See
<A HREF="https://www.ft.com/content/a97491a4-469f-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8">
    this Financial Times article</A>
for a fun little counterargument on the use of "and".)

Romer wants this sort of analysis to be easier to do, so
that it can be used more easily to check and improve the
World Bank's reports.  After looking at some other patterns
of possible interest, he closes with this:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 To experiment with something like this, researchers in
 the Bank should be able to spin up a server in the
 cloud, download some open-source software and start
 experimenting, all within minutes.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Wonderful: a call for storing data in easy-to-access forms
and a call for using (and writing) programs to analyze text,
all in the name not of advancing economics technically but
of improving its ability to communicate its results.
Computing becomes a tool integrated into the process of the
World Bank doing its designated job.  We need more leaders
in more disciplines thinking this way.  Fortunately, we hear
reports of such folks more often these days.

Alas, data and programs were not used in this way when Romer
arrived at the World Bank:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 When I arrived, this was not possible because people
 in ITS did not trust people from DEC and, reading
 between the lines, were tired of dismissive arrogance
 that people from DEC displayed.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

One way to create more trust is to communicate better.
Not being dismissively arrogant is, too, though calling
that sort of behavior out may be what got Romer in so
much hot water with the administrators and economists at
the World Bank in the first place.
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