Speaking to the Lowest Common Denominator

Why are specialists in so many fields always so eager to use arcane doctrine that no one outside their profession can understand? I suppose one obvious answer is job insurance. If being a lawyer means years of training in the use of Latin phrases, than its much easier to demand large sums for your services. But most researchers go about their work in the belief that it will have some impact on the larger world. If this is the case, than its obviously important to think about how you can reach the lowest common denominator of public understanding without loosing the gist of your message in the process.

I'm certainly not the first one to tackle the enigma of incomprehensible academic writing; Daniel Drezner has a post on the topic here. However, I would like to point one great example of how serious academic research has been packaged in an easy to understand format without much being lost in the process.

If you have been following Development Economics at all for the past few months, you have no doubt heard about Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL (for a good overview on Banerjee and Duflo's findings, read the teaser for their new book in FP).* This is an effort to use Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) to gather quantitative, or hard, evidence on which development projects just sound good and which actually work in practice. The RCT process (which has its origins in medical testing) requires implementing projects in some locations while not doing so in other "controls." At the end of the evaluation, the two sample pools are then compared to see what impact the project actually had. Obviously this approach has stirred up a lot of controversy, which is well covered in this great post at the now dormant Aid Watch blog.

Despite the critiques about RCTs, J-PAL has quickly become something of a media sensation. And when you look at their website, its no wonder why. While most academic websites are dry repositories of even drier academic papers, J-PAL has taken their findings and created a simple, clean webpage where the results of their various projects are presented in a way almost anyone can make sense of. No p-values or STATA output tables here, just easy to follow bar graphs on topics like improving school attendance, which make even cost benefit analysis seem interesting. And if you're worried that this "dumming down" of research results might somehow jeopardize centuries of accumulated practice, don't worry, the academic papers are still there too. One can only hope that this is the start of a trend that more academics (and governments) will start to pick up on.

If anyone knows of any other good examples of bridging the academic-public gap or has any thoughts on the subject, please let me know!

*Caveat: one of my good friends works on a J-PAL project.