“Bankspeak” (or, Orwellian development)

What can quantitative linguistic analysis tell us about the operations and outlook of the international financial institutions? At first glance, the words most frequently used in the World Bank’s Annual Reports give an impression of unbroken continuity. Seven are near the top at any given time: three nouns—bank, loan/s, development—and four adjectives: fiscal, economic, financial, private. This septet is joined by a handful of other nouns: IBRD, countries, investment/s, interest, programme/s, project/s, assistance, and—though initially less frequent—lending, growth, cost, debt, trade, prices.

…And yet, behind this façade of uniformity, a major metamorphosis has taken place. Here is how the Bank’s Report described the world in 1958:

The Congo’s present transport system is geared mainly to the export trade, and is based on river navigation and on railroads which lead from river ports into regions producing minerals and agricultural commodities. Most of the roads radiate short distances from cities, providing farm-to-market communications. In recent years road traffic has increased rapidly with the growth of the internal market and the improvement of farming methods.

And here is the Report from half a century later, in 2008:

Levelling the playing field on global issues

Countries in the region are emerging as key players on issues of global concern, and the Bank’s role has been to support their efforts by partnering through innovative platforms for an enlightened dialogue and action on the ground, as well as by supporting South–South cooperation.

It’s almost another language, in both semantics and grammar. The key discontinuity, as we shall see, falls mostly between the first three decades and the last two, the turn of the 1990s, when the style of the Reports becomes much more codified, self-referential and detached from everyday language. It is this Bankspeak that will be the protagonist of the pages that follow.

Later…

This recurrent transmutation of social forces into abstractions turns the World Bank Reports into strangely metaphysical documents, whose protagonists are often not economic agents, but principles—and principles of so universal a nature, it’s impossible to oppose them. Levelling the playing field on global issues: no one will ever object to these words (although, of course, no one will ever be able to say what they really mean, either).

That is Franco Moretti and Dominque Pestre in the New Left Review. Well worth reading.

The delicious irony is that the article is written in the dense, jargon-filled prose of literary criticism mingled with Marxist thought. So sometimes I have no idea what they’re saying.

A plea, then, for people to write in simple plain prose, free of jargon.

It also suggests a more mundane explanation for bad Bank reports, which might also explain badly-written literary criticism: bureaucracies (and academic disciplines) get big and decrepit over time. And obscure language preserves the insider privilege and makes mediocre work more difficult to judge.

Hat tip to David Evans.

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