Gobbledygook economics: Plain English crucified

Collins dictionary explains the word gobbledygook as, if you describe a speech or piece of writing as gobbledygook, you are criticizing it for seeming like nonsense and being very technical or complicated. In this article I criticise the language and the arguments used in a piece titled When cooks get paid more than engineers that was published online Indian Express on 5^th October 2017. The purpose is twofold. First is to appeal to experts to write in plain English when they write for general readers. Second purpose is to show that poor writing defeats the purpose for which it is written. The writer of above article is Chairman of Economic Advisory Council to the prime minister of India and is held in high regard by thousands of readers including myself. By writing an incoherent piece he has not added to public discussion of unemployment in India beyond repeating simplistic text book answer.

Before you read further I urge you to read the article by Dr Bibek Debroy first. Welcome back if you have returned after reading the article.

Here is part of first paragraph of the article.

We have been repeatedly warned against blindly believing everything we read or are forwarded. With that dash of sodium chloride, here is the gist of a message …. A restaurant ….requires a full-time porotta maker, at a monthly salary of Rs 18,000 to Rs 20,000. A concern … requires a full-time “civil engineering B.Tech or diploma holder, at a monthly salary of Rs 6,000 to Rs 7,000”.

In the first sentence writer warns us against blindly believing everything we read. Good advice. I take it seriously and continue reading the article carefully. Second sentence says that first sentence was ‘dash of sodium chloride’. I am not a chemist so I did not realise immediately ‘sodium chloride’ means salt. I paused and wanted to make sense of what has common salt to do with risk of ‘blindly believing’. Salt is used in most Indian food as flavour enhancing ingredient but that does not seem to be purpose of writer to introduce sodium chloride. Perhaps it is meant as a health warning as too much salt is harmful for health.  Or the purpose is to refer to medical use of salt for replacing loss of fluids in body. Or is to refer to gargle with lukewarm salty water, as my granny would advise, to clear bacterial infection in throat. Or more probably the writer wants us to take what we get forwarded with a pinch of salt. This well known English idiom is better option to dash of sodium chloride.  The inspiration for the article appears to be on going public discussion about unemployment in India. A forwarded message about disparity between salaries advertised for a cook and an engineer provides a good way to start but then the writer assaults common language in the following couple of sentences.

These are two isolated advertisements from Kerala and don’t constitute a proper sample. However, some sample survey data is available on the internet, though sample sizes are small.

If you are not an academic researcher, who observes things and tries to identify patterns, you are unlikely to know what ‘proper sample’ means. Data is a representation of actual situation. Number of words in this article is data which indicates size of the article. Data thus helps understand the magnitude and or patterns of an issue such as unemployment. To understand any patterns in unemployment economists face difficult task of observing millions of people. Since it is generally not possible to collect data on all population in any large country data is collected on a small number of people as representation for whole population. That small number of people is sample. ‘Proper sample’ means the selected sample represents the characteristics of the population. Let us continue with the article.

For instance, the salary of a cook (not a chef) is Rs 12,000 per month in Delhi and that of an engineering diploma (not degree) holder between Rs 10,000 and Rs 12,000 per month. That of a driver is Rs 14,000 per month.

Writer carefully notes cook is not same as chef and engineer with diploma is not same as engineer with degree. But what about driver? Does writer mean driver of a car or of a truck or of a passenger bus in city or of an interstate passenger bus? Even within driver of car ‘segment’, a word we will encounter later, driver of billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s car and driver of a trader with shop will be different. Now writer wants us to tackle following.

Therefore, the correlation between education and salary isn’t quite what we might expect a priori. 

This is a fourteen word long sentence. If you are reading attentively you would have noticed that there are fifteen words in sentence. Good, but note Latin word a priori is single term. The sentence uses two technical words which will not make sense unless you are academically tuned to statistics and theoretical arguments. Of the two technical words correlation and a priori, ‘correlation’ is perhaps easier to grasp for general readers. Statistically though it has specific connotation. In this article what writer means is level of education and amount of salary do not always co-move in same direction. In other words if you spent 17 years in school and college you are not likely to earn more than someone who did not to go to school and college. Oxford English dictionary defines a priori as, “relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.” In plain English that fourteen word sentence states two things. First, according to theoretical claim of economics acquiring educational qualification should enhance your earning. Second, higher salary offered for a cook compared to salary offered for diploma holding engineer contradicts this economic theory claim. After that difficult and loaded fourteen word sentence there is some relief below.

Let me thrown in an anecdote from a colleague. His maid/cook is around 45 and has two sons, aged 18 and 20. These two have finished school and sit at home, subsisting on their mother’s salary. When my colleague asked them, “Why don’t you work as a cook?” the response was, “That is work meant for girls.”

There is typing error with spelling of ‘throw’ with ‘n’ left unedited. Through the anecdote the writer is essentially arguing that men in India consider some jobs suitable for only women and hence would not consider doing those jobs, cooking being one of them. Few men applying for cook’s job means remaining men who are able to cook and are willing to take up that job command higher salaries. The above anecdote helps but note that social scientists use the word ‘anecdote’ when they know that the evidence (views of boys in this case) they use in argument does not meet academic standards of ‘proper sample’. Let us consider another anecdote that the writer delights us with.

There is an anecdote that features in jokes about economists. In many versions of the account, economists in general take the place of Kenneth Arrow. The only authentic source of this account I know is attributed to Curt Monash, who studied in Harvard. This account goes: “I was standing with Ken Arrow by a bank of elevators on the ground floor of William James Hall at Harvard. Three elevators passed us on our way to the basement. I foolishly said ‘I wonder why everybody in the basement wants to go upstairs.’ He responded, almost instantly: ‘You’re confusing supply with demand.’ The labour market is segmented, sectorally and geographically. However, regardless of sector and geography, principles of economics — supply-demand relations — do apply.

Late professor Kenneth Arrow was the youngest economist at age of fifty one to win the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (popularly known as Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1972 along with John Hicks. So we have two intelligent men in the anecdote discussing why everybody in the basement wants to go upstairs. Professor Arrow seems to suggest more ‘demand’ upstairs explains people going upstairs and not people wanting to go upstairs without any reason. The paragraph assumes all readers understand principles of economics – supply-demand relations and can read through cryptic economic reasoning implied in six word reply of a Nobel Prize winning theoretical economist to another intelligent mathematical economist (Curt Monash got his PhD from Harvard University in Mathematics (Game Theory)). In plain English our writer is arguing that wages for different jobs are determined by need for labour for which employer is willing to pay (demand) in different industries/different places and people with appropriate skills willing to provide that labour for wages (supply). We have more to deal with in following paragraphs.

 There is a quote wrongly attributed to Thomas Carlyle. “Teach a parrot the terms ‘supply and demand’ and you’ve got an economist.” There is no evidence that Carlyle ever said or wrote anything like this. Parrot or not, the price of everything, labour included, is determined by the intersection of supply and demand, unless institutional constraints get in the way of that clearing function. Let’s take the example of a cook’s wages being more than that of an engineering diploma

The first two sentences could be challenged on grounds of logical reasoning. The writer says that Thomas Carlyle did not say something because there is no evidence that he ever said or wrote that statement. Philosophical objection is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Yes the writer could have said that quote is ‘very likely wrongly attributed’.  However, the steepest step of technical jargon that writer challenges general reader to climb is in following statement. The writer offers economic law that the price of everything including labour is determined where supply and demand meet. The rule holds true when there are no institutional constraints. What does institutional constraints mean? What is clearing function? Clearing function of labour markets refers to process whereby suppliers of labour and those who want labour services come to an agreeable wage rate. I shy away from explaining institutional constraints. The last sentence of the paragraph is grammatically wrong. It compares cook to an engineering diploma. This appears to be another example of poor editing. It appears word ‘holder’ is missing after diploma which would have allowed comparing cook’s wages to that of an engineering diploma holder’s. The writer then moves to explain the disparity between wages of cook and engineer in theoretical language.

What we have observed is a market clearing wage. Purely on this basis, it is impossible to ascribe it to either purely supply or demand, since the outcome happens to be a combination of both.

The writer says that this disparity in wages (the outcome) is result of a combination of demand and supply forces. The writer then takes us on bumpy intellectual ride across India that explains differences in unemployment rates in urban and rural areas and complex definition of unemployment. We find that a survey done by Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy puts an individual in one of the following four statuses:

1.       Is currently employed.

2.       Is not employed but is willing to work and is actively looking for a job.

3.       Is not employed, is willing to work but is not actively looking for a job.

4.       Is not employed, is not willing to work and is not looking for a job.

Adding number of people in 1 and 2 provides total labour force. People with status 2 as percentage of total labour force (1+2) is unemployment rate. Read following paragraph.

We should certainly have a discussion on the unemployment rate. However, given the example I started with, there is an aspect that is missing from the customary discussion. This is highlighted in the document, “Unemployment in India, A Statistical Profile” — a separate product from the same survey. This has the standard unemployment rate, but also has something known as greater unemployment rate, that is, including those who are unemployed and willing to work, but inactive in seeking jobs.

Here author introduces us to greater unemployment rate which he then compares for different age groups and males and female as following.

The gap between the two rates is highest in the 15-19 age-group, followed by the 20-24 age-group for males, while it is uniform across all age-groups for females.

This dense statement says that the gap between standard unemployment rate and greater unemployment rate is highest in 15-19 age group but does not tell how much that gap is. I also cannot fathom from the statement what the gap is among female groups even if it is uniform across the groups. So we are left wondering what to make of this information. Generally writers provide information to support some conclusion. But read what conclusion is drawn below and look for any evidence provided to support it.

Going back to supply and demand curves for labour and their intersection, everything else remaining the same, wages drop/increase when either supply or demand curves, or both, shift. I think there is an issue of correlation between education and skills, or its lack. Some educational attainment may help acquisition of skills, but the correlation isn’t strong. For females, the gap is uniform across age. However, for younger males, the job-seeker’s perception may be of a stronger correlation than warranted.

Again the first sentence fires technical bullets to puncture our common sense about labour market. Assuming your brain survives wordy googly of intersecting curves of supply and demand while everything else remains the same we read ‘Wages drop/increase when either supply or demand curves, or both, shift.’  Wages change rather than ‘drop/increase’ would be simpler. Anyway why do wages changes. Because of shift in supply curve or shift in demand curve or because of both. Are we any wiser after reading this? Suddenly from this school text book explanation of law of supply and demand, author draws conclusion based on ‘I think..’ that correlation between educational attainment and acquisition of skills is weak. Nowhere in the whole article the writer has provided any data to suggest that educational attainment, which I think means qualifications here, do not lead to development of skills. How this conclusion drawn is beyond my understanding. Then we have final two sentences. I simply cannot understand what writer is trying to say by for females, the gap is uniform across age. Final sentence mentions job seeker’s perception. Perception about what? Please help.