The Atlantic has a great article on new ways to share research results. Its three parts make three points: A graphical user interface (GUI) can facilitate better technical writing. Wolfram’s proprietary notebook showcased innovative technology, but decades after its introduction, still has few users. Jupyter is a new open-source alternative that is well on the way to becoming a standard for exchanging research results. Each is spot on. I had to learn the hard way why so many kept their distance from Mathematica.

The Financial Times quoted accurately the following sentence from an internal email that I wrote: “Imagine a field of science in which people publish research papers with data that are obviously fabricated. …”Some readers mistakenly assumed that this sentence was supposed to convey a hidden meaning. To be clear, I am not aware of a single instance in which someone at the Bank published fabricated data, most certainly not “obviously fabricated” data.

In a conversation with a reporter, I made comments about the Doing Business report that gave the impression that I suspected political manipulation or bias. This was not what I meant to say or thought I said. I have not seen any sign of manipulation of the numbers published in Doing Business report or in any other Bank report. What I did want to say is something many of us in the Bank believe–that we could do a better job of explaining what our numbers mean.

As a follow up to the story in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), I’ve been delving into the details of the calculations behind the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings for Chile. I thought it would be helpful to illustrate what the rankings would be under an unchanging measure of the business climate. To be specific, what I decided in advance was to pick all of the underlying variables for Doing Business indicators that are available for all 5 years, DB 2014-2018.

Because it is New Year’s Eve, I indulged in some Twitter. One exchange might be worth unscrambling from some others. Dani Rodrik triggered it with a post that offered this advice to non-economists: Do not let math scare you; economists use math not because they are smart, but because they are not smart enough. Lukas Freund responded on Twitter: Agree on many points, which in classic Rodrik-fashion are pithy but insightful.