Well, I don't know how much uninformed about economics you actually are, but I think that at least part of this perceived verbosity is due to you being acquaint

Well, I don't know how much uninformed about economics you actually are, but I think that at least part of this perceived verbosity is due to you being acquainted with it through stuff aimed at lay people. The Economist is a sort of popular economics reporting magazine (a "pop-econ" magazine). The stuff they write is aimed at a general audience. Though admittedly economic articles are do seem verbose when compared with math or physics articles. But there's a lot of variance in their verbosity, too: theoretical articles are pretty much just math. Empirical guys on the other hand are always somewhat verbose, as they like having some plausible stories behind the mechanisms they're testing or to explain why their instrumental variable is exogenous. The literature of subfields are/were almost entirely verbose, such as in the case of the old institutional economics. I'd say that it all boils down to: how wide the intended audience is; how established is a field or subfield is; how do new articles fit in with the older literature. When all you've got in your head is some hazy philosophical point, trying to formalize it from the outset will probably just alienate you from the discipline. So older literature will be, on average, more verbose than current literature. On the other hand, if all people do is point out more and more new issues, and if every new article is "orthogonal" to each other, they might never produce a succint framework (in which case it all turns into philosophy). And this goes for other fields too: mathematics was a verbose field too until some of it's ideas became common sense, and so was physics. Economics is still undergoing a lot of changes, and will probably undergo a lot more as economists focus themselves on narrower issues and as more data is collected.