[PEN-L:2390] Re: Re: Re: 1998 Bad Writing Contest winners

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Sounds to me like Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets, by a certain J.
>Bradford DeLong.
>
>Josh
>


Yep. Ain't it awful?...

--the pointlessly pedantic use of "a sequence of economies."

--the repeated use of "E((Delta){R(n)-R(i)})" instead of reminding readers
what that object is.

--the failure to spell out what the "substantially different dynamics" of
the system are.

--the logical lapse involved in not spelling out the conditions under which
randomly-trading noise traders lose relative wealth (I forgot that I was
supposed to show not that sophisticated investors earn higher rates of
return than if they invested everything they own in risk-free bonds, but
higher rates of return than randomly-trading noise traders).

--the use of Greek symbols instead of more descriptive phrases (like "the
variation in noise traders' misperceptions") to erect artificial barriers
to those who have not been recently rolling in statistics and yet wish to
read the article.

--the use of "become unbounded" when earlier in the paragraph I used
"approach infinity" for the same concept--and the failure to point out the
direction in which demands become unboundedly large.


Brad DeLong


P.S.: Anyone care to try to translate Butler's award-winning paragraph into
reasonably idiomatic English?