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April 8, 2008
The Fed Meeting Minutes? Unreadable
In scanning the Fed's minutes from its March meetings my eyes kept glazing over, even more so than usual for such turgid stuff. So I decided to check the document's readability, via the Flesch-Kincaid test. Here is the result:
How does that compare to other documents? Well, lower numbers on the F-K test mean the text is less readable, so higher, to a point, is better. Time magazine scores around 40, and a random academic paper I grabbed out of Current Biology (okay, a classic on why monkeys trade-off juice for images of female monkeys) comes at a reading ease of 30-ish, and a similar grade level.
In other words, the Fed transcript is tough stuff to slog through. Maybe the Fed is trying to cloud our minds with unreadable text. Admittedly, it's only a theory.
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