You'd sound smarter if you wrote less clearly

What better use for such a fascinating map than as the underside of a tabletop? To form a joint between his base and that top, Dendra carved a 3-D negative of the sonic map. The two pieces mesh perfectly. The table, which he calls ”Peak-T (Noisy Tea Time)” is conceptually brilliant and more than a little decadent in its contrast between headspinning form and ordinary function.

The formula remains more or less the same, though the publisher reports that while ”Zombies” had an Austen-to-fresh-prose ratio of 85 to 15, the new one is closer to 60 to 40.

”Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” also pairs Austen with a new collaborator. Seth Grahame-Smith, who did the zombie bits for Quirk, has moved on, having signed a deal for a reported $570,000 to write a pseudo-biography, ”Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” in the style of Doris Kearns Goodwin, for the big-league publisher Grand Central. (Love this quote from Grahame-Smith’s new editor: ”When this idea was pitched, it just immediately made sense to me and I thought it was a great direction for him.”) Helping to write ”Sea Monsters” was one Ben H. Winters, a Brooklyn-based journalist and playwright.

One might think there was room enough in the world for a wooden-stake-wielding Lincoln and man-eating jellyfish. But in a press release touting ”Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters,” the Quirk editor Jason Rekulak appears to dis Grahame-Smith’s new project: ”A couple of publishers are crashing Jane Austen vampire novels that will no doubt capitalize on the success of ’Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,’ and there were certainly plenty of people who urged me to do the same,” he writes. ”But I didn’t want to go out with the one-millionth vampire novel that’s going to be published this year...the genre feels exhausted to me.’’

”It is with apologies to my research and writing mentors that I report the following events,” he writes, in the September issue of ”Econ Journal Watch.”

The story began, Hakes writes, when an economist friend of his concocted a complex, equation-driven explanation of how some companies used certain kinds of warranties to extract ”rent,” or unearned money, from their customers. Trouble was, no one could follow the friend’s argument.

Hakes, who grasped the gist immediately, thought the argument deserved broad circulation. Impressed with Hakes’s explanatory skills, the friend recruited him to be a coauthor. After some labor, Hakes writes, ”We managed to reduce the equations in the paper to six. At this stage the paper was perfectly clear and was written at a level so that it could reach a broad audience.”

Too clear, apparently: When the authors submitted the paper to a journal, the referees deemed the argument ”self-evident.” In response, the editor suggested ”generalizing” the conclusion with some mathematical formulas. So Hakes and his friend went back to work, re-complicating their work. ”The resulting paper had fifteen equations,” Hakes writes, in his mea culpa, ”two propositions and proofs, dozens of additional mathematical expressions, and a mathematical appendix containing nineteen equations and even more mathematical expressions.”

”I personally could no longer understand the paper and I could not possibly present the paper alone,” he added. ”. . .Even for mathematicians, the paper may no longer pass a cost-benefit test. That is, the time and effort necessary to read the paper may exceed the benefits received from reading it.”

Hakes’s professors in graduate school had warned him against mistaking the complex for the profound, and he thought he’d absorbed the lesson. But the professional culture drives good economists to do bad things.

”I am now part of the conspiracy,” Hakes laments, ”to intentionally make simple ideas obscure and complex.”

Christopher Shea is a weekly columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at brainiac.email@gmail.com.