Paul Romer and the World Bank and "Bankspeak" and

May 26, 2017 9:14 AM

Paul Romer is an economist whose academic contributions focus on how endogenous improvements in production contribute to long-run growth. Last July, he was appointed chief economist of the World Bank. This week, he was apparently removed from his managing duties after his staff rebelled against his management style, apparently in part for asking them to communicate more clearly.

Romer, who "suffers from dyslexia" wrote a (previously internal) blog post about clear communication back in January. In it, he linked to a 2015 Stanford Literary Lab analysis of the World Bank's evolving communication style - it's "Bankspeak" - by a linguist and computer scientist. He focused on the overuse of the word "and," which the Stanford paper skewered:

The first passage—a grammatico-political monstrosity—is a small present to our patient readers; the second, more guarded, is also more indicative of the rhetoric in question. Knowledge-sharing has really nothing to do with client orientation; poverty reduction, nothing to do with either. There is no reason they should appear together. But those “ands” connect them just the same, despite the total absence of logic, and their paratactical crudity becomes almost a justification: we have so many important things to do, we can’t afford to be elegant; we must take care of our clients, yes (we are, remember, a bank); but we also care about knowledge! and partnership! and sharing! and poverty!

Romer's blog post about losing the management responsibilities of his job.

Tyler Cowen and Kevin Drum also wrote about Romer's ouster and the Stanford lab report. Drum points out that Romer had written and spoken critically about a "post-real" trend in macroeconomics research, which may not have ingratiated him to his staff. (But that's probably the subject of another post!)

Previously on Romer's academic work and his suggestion of "charter cities" as a development strategy, which went over like a ton of bricks when we talked about it in 2014.

posted by dismas (15 comments total)

I should add that Tyler Cowen excerpts a Financial Times article which I didn't include because it was paywalled; included in that article is this particular nugget:

“A [World Development Report], like a knife, has to be narrow to penetrate deeply,” he added. “To drive home the importance of focus, I’ve told the authors that I will not clear the final report if the frequency of ‘and’ exceeds 2.6%.”

The 2.6 per cent bar, Mr Romer told the FT, marked the current frequency of “and” in scholarly writing. It also, according to an analysis of bank reports going back decades that he commissioned, was roughly where World Bank report authors landed in the institution’s early years.

But the use of the word “and” over the years had doubled to almost 7 per cent in World Bank reports, Mr Romer pointed out in a January memo to his staff.
posted by dismas at 9:19 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is one of things where it's unclear where the problem actually lay. I suspect World Bank employees would tell a different story. The language thing seems like a head fake.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:21 AM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I tend to agree. Romer has an occasionally caustic blogging style; I can imagine that he might have rubbed his staff the wrong way if that's how he communicated generally. Obviously, success as an academic doesn't map cleanly onto success as a manager of a large organization. But I thought the Stanford thing was interesting in its own right (there's a lot more to it than "and.")
posted by dismas at 9:24 AM on May 26, 2017

This tweet was rather interesting. I wonder what the back story is.
posted by infini at 9:44 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

The language thing seems like a head fake.

Could be, but, I've seen organizations devour themselves over the conflict between doing a thing, and communicating it well. The conflict linked in the OP sounds totally genuine.
posted by entropone at 10:12 AM on May 26, 2017

My postmodernist philosophical thesis: in 2017, if you are not effectively communicating what you are doing, you are not doing it.
posted by radicalawyer at 10:49 AM on May 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

It sounds like Romer worried a lot about how his subordinates communicated with the rest of the world, but not much about how he communicated with them. But that's just a hot take; it's probably hard enough for an insider to judge who was in the wrong, here, so I have no idea.
posted by Edgewise at 11:37 AM on May 26, 2017

So the story is that a top level male academic finds a way to shirk administrative duties to focus on their own research by pissing everyone else off so much they agree to take over for him?

Dog bites man.
posted by srboisvert at 12:04 PM on May 26, 2017

My postmodernist philosophical thesis: in 2017, if you are not effectively communicating what you are doing, you are not doing it.

Why in the world would you believe this?
posted by kenko at 12:08 PM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

"My postmodernist philosophical thesis: in 2017, if you are not effectively communicating what you are doing, you are not doing it."

I actually think that applies a lot to the world of medicine and medical education...
posted by midmarch snowman at 12:44 PM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

He canceled a regular publication that didn’t have a clear purpose

AN HERO.

(altho it definitely sounds like an academic who may have had good intentions but 0 skills as a manager.)
posted by epersonae at 1:00 PM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

kenko: "if you are not effectively communicating what you are doing"

you need to hire a communications specialist. This isn't rocket science. Some people are really good at communicating and most aren't. Lots of the ones who aren't still think they know a lot about it (I mean, everyone reads the newspaper, watches TV and follows Twitter, so we're all fluent communicators duh). It's valuable to recognize your own limitations in this area, and it's worth the money to hire someone to do it for you.
posted by chavenet at 2:37 PM on May 26, 2017

From the article, he also threatened a bunch of jobs (not clear if he succeeded in firing people):

He declared several positions redundant and enforced term limits on senior managers. In the interview, Romer said he cut more than $1 million in annual expenses from the group’s budget.

That's bound to have made him unpopular.

It also sounds like he was good at criticizing work he didn't like but not so good at inspiring and leading work that he would've preferred. Nobody likes to work for someone like that.
posted by clawsoon at 7:41 PM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Check this out: it's his mirror site of internal communications.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:16 PM on May 26, 2017

“A [World Development Report], like a knife, has to be narrow to penetrate deeply,” he added. “To drive home the importance of focus, I’ve told the authors that I will not clear the final report if the frequency of ‘and’ exceeds 2.6%.”

Christ, what and asshole.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:45 PM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]