Nobody reads your eighty-page report

When I’m arguing to more AI-pilled friends that the tech’s diffusion through the economy might be slower than they think, one of my go-to examples is “doctors still use fax machines.” But another good one, that I just learned from global development expert Todd Moss, is “31 percent of the World Bank’s policy reports are never downloaded, but the bank still writes them.” It’s not just the World Bank, though; NGOs and think tanks across DC and the world are putting out myriad reports, dozens if not hundreds of pages long, every month, despite compelling evidence that very few people read them. The biggest problem with this, as Moss says, is that it’s a tragic waste of talent: “The opportunity cost to busy people – who should be world-leading experts on vital social, economic, and political issues – is actually mind-boggling. Imagine the social good such smart capable people could do with all the time not spent on long reports.”