On writing as value… paul Romer

http://wb-ce.org/writing.html
People make progress by discovering and sharing useful ideas. The value of an idea is proportional to the number of people who use it.

Spoken language gave humans a unique capacity for moving an idea from one person’s neurons to another’s. Writing makes it possible for one person to convey an idea to many others. If a document is well written, anyone with a copy can read it and convert the codified knowledge stored in text back into human capital stored in neurons.

Writing is the bottleneck that holds back the rate of diffusion of ideas. Writing is a production process that converts knowledge stored in neurons into knowledge codified as text. Writing clearly and concisely is a time consuming, multi-stage process that starts with composing and is followed by multiple rounds of editing and user testing. The essence of this process is captured by the apology that I used as the tagline for this update: “I would have written less but I didn’t have the time.”