The story was one of the saddest I have read in ages. The World Bank’s chief economist ordered his staff to write more clearly, shut them up whenever they banged on interminably in presentations, and insisted all reports were short and lucid. Instead of being lauded for his bravery Paul Romer was punished like a heretic, and his management duties were taken from him. His story reads like a corporate take on the martyrdom of Joan of Arc.
There is only one quarrel I have with Mr Romer. Among his edicts was to impose a quota on the word “and”, ruling that an official report should contain no more than 2.6 per cent of them. It is a bit odd to persecute the common conjunction, which has the advantages of being useful, clear and short, when there are all those words out there — leverage, deliver, journey, dialogue, platform, learnings or robust and a thousand others — that are none of these things.
Yet when the Stanford Literary Lab published a paper in 2015 analysing World Bank reports, “and” came in for a hiding. The authors noted its use had almost doubled in the previous 70 years and mockingly quoted passages in which ugly, unrelated nouns were slung together with chains of conjunctions.