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Related. The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads: https://archive.vn/N6Gvy https://archive.vn/N6Gvy Does Anyone Ever Read PD

Related. The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads: https://archive.vn/N6Gvy https://archive.vn/N6Gvy Does Anyone Ever Read PDFs? https://priceonomics.com/does-anyone-ever-read-pdfs/ https://priceonomics.com/does-anyone-ever-read-pdfs/ "Nearly one-third of World Bank reports have never been downloaded, not even once.”" "Over 30% of the 1,611 policy reports published from 2008 to 2012 were never downloaded. As each report costs an average of $180,000 in terms of researchers’ time and other expenses, a ballpark estimate of the amount of money spent researching and writing reports that did not merit a single download is $93 million. In addition, 87% of the reports went uncited." Dear Think Tanks: Nobody is Reading Your PDFs: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dear-think-tanks-nobody-reading-your-pdfs-kurt-voelker https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dear-think-tanks-nobody-readi... World Bank learns most PDFs it produces go unread: https://www.smh.com.au/world/world-bank-learns-most-pdfs-it-produces-go-unread-20140509-zr7fs.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/world-bank-learns-most-pdfs-it-...

londons_explore 4y ago
> Nearly one-third of World Bank reports have never been downloaded, not even once. This surprises me... At the very least, most search engines download PDF's to index them. And the web archive crawler would probably be expected to visit something like the world bank too. And I would guess most governments around the world would have a team of economists which would be expected to have read reports by the world bank. I can only suspect they were hidden away behind a login-wall or deliberately obscure because they contained information that officially had to be public, but someone wanted to not be revealed.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  The counts were determined using a web analytics package which presumably can separate crawler downloads from real users.
Aunche 4y ago
It's depressing that despite how much information is painstakingly gathered, available for free on the internet, people still choose to get their information about economics and policy from memes that have no basis on reality. For example, whenever you see someone mention the World Bank's studies of the reduction, you'll inevitably see a highly upvoted response of how this is actually bad because it means subsidence farmers' livelyhoods are being replaced by sTArVatION wAGeS. However, if they bothered to read the source, they'd know that the international poverty isn't measured by wages at all but by consumption.

londons_explore 4y ago

> Nearly one-third of World Bank reports have never been downloaded, not even once. This surprises me... At the very least, most search engines download PDF's to index them. And the web archive crawler would probably be expected to visit something like the world bank too. And I would guess most governments around the world would have a team of economists which would be expected to have read reports by the world bank. I can only suspect they were hidden away behind a login-wall or deliberately obscure because they contained information that officially had to be public, but someone wanted to not be revealed.

mike_hearn 4y ago
The counts were determined using a web analytics package which presumably can separate crawler downloads from real users.

Aunche 4y ago

It's depressing that despite how much information is painstakingly gathered, available for free on the internet, people still choose to get their information about economics and policy from memes that have no basis on reality. For example, whenever you see someone mention the World Bank's studies of the reduction, you'll inevitably see a highly upvoted response of how this is actually bad because it means subsidence farmers' livelyhoods are being replaced by sTArVatION wAGeS. However, if they bothered to read the source, they'd know that the international poverty isn't measured by wages at all but by consumption.