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.
