I can't get past how needlessly wordy this article is. It's as if someone is trying to flaunt their language skills and it distracts me from the actual content; I must admit that I read the whole thing and did not catch wind of the author's point.
Sentences like these just read as nonsense to me:
"The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating."
That sentence is perfectly clear to me, and English is not my first language. I don't even perceive the style as pretentious or "wordy": it seems the appropriate register for a magazine like the Economist.
it seems the appropriate register for a magazine like the Economist.
I guess that may be true, but why should it be that way? It could have been restated as 'the theory's good, I had expected more predictions'.
The Economist has a highly focused strategy on appealing to particular demographics - high language comprehension skills help position it in the high-value part of the market. It's obviously working, last time i checked it was making huge market share gains and profitability precisely because it was focusing on 5% of the world's richest people, not the local or bulk.
I read it every week and it is very well written. don't confuse that with believing what it says - in today's lingo, it's definitely a 1%er...
People who don't like big words work to continually reassure themselves they're missing no precision of meaning or accuracy of tone. They often are. The selection has a grade level of 15.73 (aka, Junior in college)
Doesn't mean everything should be expressed at the college reading level, but it doesn't mean everything else should be expressed at the reading level of a 6th grader.
To move this sentence down to the flesch reading level of a 6th grader requires the following:
>The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating
to
>Acemoglu's idea make sense to me. I'm still mad and unsettled that it does not tell the government what to do to fix the problem.
FK Grade level of 5.8
And it had to go into the 1st person to do so, Try to write the sentence, capturing all the nuance of what he's saying and keeping it in the third person. Requires several more lines.
It could not, because the theory as presented in the book is flawed (according to the reviewer). One could restate the ideas more simply, but to do so accurately would require many more words.
The Economist is a specific publication that has the whole of the English language available to its authors, rather than just the portions introduced before 8th grade. USA Today exists for the other markets.
Complex vocabulary has the opportunity to convey nuance and heterogeneity that simplistic vocabulary glosses over. It is one of the features of the paper, along with occasionally admitting they are wrong and usually providing rational explanations for the positions they take. I also don't agree with them, but have read the paper for over two decades and it has never induced the blind rage the stupidity and sloppy thinking of network news always seems to manage in the first few minutes.
Many discussions could be more productive if other people emulated their philosophy.
That doesn't express the same thoughts at all though.
I guess what it comes down to is that some people perhaps see it as pompous to place the precise expression of one's thoughts above the simple and efficient conveyance of information.
To these people, I say: read more poetry.
To find true opacity-for-its-own-sake one must look to the french postmodern "philosophers" of the 1960s:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
I don't understand. This kind of sentences is routine in New York Times. If anything, I find the conversational tone inappropriate for such a weighty subject. I do agree that the author tried too hard to write to a broader audience on a complicated subject. The result is too much ink for too little info.
It was not the best-written Economist article I have read, but I didn't find it that bad. I don't really have a problem with the sentence you quoted either.
I got the same feeling and was reminded of this essay by G. Orwell. http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.htm.... The wordiness adds pomp and circumstance to the article, which I guess the authors take to mean that it makes it sound authoritative.
I can't seem to find a way to reply to this comment without setting the flame-thrower to 10, which goes against the 'say it to your face' principle. I guess I can say that I find it very sad that a sentence like that causes any difficulty to a native speaker of English.
I've just disagreed with the authors about Botswana and the French Revolution. Nonetheless, they are wise and understand why nations fail. People suffer when nations fail. What should people do differently to avoid their nations failing? Since the authors had described the problems so well, I hoped that they would offer advice, for I felt sure that it would also be good. They give very little advice. I found that frustrating.
There is a lot of meaning packed into that sentence (read in context). It is brief, not wordy. Unpacking the sentence to make its meaning plain for all to read is self-defeating because it requires too many words. That surfeit of words, if sustained for the length of a book review, re-hides the meaning.
Sentences like these just read as nonsense to me:
"The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating."