Dr Seuss called in to jazz up Bank reports

FROM Green Eggs and Ham to The Cat in The Hat, Dr Seuss books have helped generations of children to read – but it has now been disclosed they also taught Bank of England staff how to write reports on inflation and quantitative easing.

Dame Nemat Shafik, who was deputy governor until February, told the Hay Festival the US author’s stories were used as a training tool.

“Dr Seuss was a genius at getting young children to read by using very simple language and very short words,” she said.

“And so we did a little research at the Bank of England on the linguistic complexity of our publications and found that our typical publications, like our inflation report, were only accessible to one in five people in the UK given the [average] literacy levels in the UK,” she said. “Clearly that’s not good enough.”

She said it was not about “dumbing down” as “the people who really know their stuff can explain things clearly and simply in accessible language”.

The strategy was brought in after Andy Haldane, the Bank’s chief economist, admitted in a speech last year even he could not understand some financial jargon.

“Conversations with countless experts and independent financial advisers have confirmed for me only one thing – that they have no clue either. That is a desperately poor basis for sound financial planning,” he said.

Green Eggs and Ham was written after Theodor Seuss Geisel’s editor bet he could not write a book of 50 words or less. It uses exactly 50.

Dame Nemat, who left the Bank to become director of the London School of Economics, also spoke about the formation of policy in a “post-truth world”.

“We forget all the times that experts got it right,” she said. Although “there’s a ton of information” out there “there are very important differences between information and knowledge”.