another off-cut from my manuscript…
I’ve spent most of my career in the foothills and loopholes of finance and its regulations.
This lifelong practice has given me, I think, greater than normal powers of skimming things for detail. I was lucky enough to have been given the secret early on, by an older colleague, of how to read official documents.
The key to understanding is that tax policy, legal drafting and regulation all seem to read as huge heaps of detailed special cases, but they are written as general principles.
The clauses and subclauses proliferate, but the original principles remain – either written down somewhere or implicitly in the culture of the regulatory body in charge – and they’re used to help the regulators make decisions in new cases as they arise.
So the secret of reading a complicated document is to always be looking for the high level principles which generate the specific points. Sometimes you’ll be lucky and get someone who tells you what they are, in short and clear sentences, either in the front or the back of the book.
Often, because people aren’t always great at knowing what’s important, you’ll get an entirely misleading summary, where the really important general principles aren’t what the author thinks they are.
The tell-tale for this is that you’ll find odd little contradictions somewhere in the document, where they say something in a specific case which looks completely at odds with what the key principle was meant to be.
The authors of official documents also set these kinds of traps because they’re often working within political constraints – you can sometimes see evidence of a “drafting war”, where something has been written as a group project between factions who don’t agree with each other.
When you’re reading a work like Stafford Beer’s “Brain of the Firm”, Marx’s “Das Kapital” or God’s “The Bible”, though, you have a different problem – a lot of the time, the author is carrying on an argument with other authors on the same subject.
This means that you will get long, multiple-page sections which are dedicated to refuting points made by someone who is long since forgotten and whose work you will never read. Even worse than that, you might get passages that are meant to anticipate critiques from people who mattered a lot to the author at the time, but who have long since ceased to be relevant.
Skipping over these bits not only saves time but actually makes it easier to understand what the real point of the book was.
It’s also important to remember that quite a lot of the rest of the time, the author might be joking.
As a one-time banking lawyer, I mostly agree with you for regulations, but not statutes. Regulators and legislators are different beasts. Regulators are trying to make policy via consensus; legislators are trying to get reelected via majority rule. Furthermore, legislation is much stickier than regulation, especially in the US with its multiplicity of veto points. Much of the language in the National Banking Act traces back to 1838, although this is admittedly an extreme example. Federal banking legislation (at least in the US) therefore contains all kinds of strange warts and goiters. Various constituents get toked notwithstanding the sense of the statute, and weird old statutory language persists because nobody bothered to get rid of it.
Although God's "The Bible" is already generally acknowledged to be the work of multiple contending factions (especially the notorious "Gospels" section of part two) and that isn't even taking into account the copious evidence of numerous editors who were clearly arguing with each other, let alone with authors that we no longer have the evidence for (thanks to effective document destruction.) [Disclaimer: I write this as a practising Christian. But probably the sort of Christian that would be burned for heresy not that long ago, just for saying this.]
But yeah, this is an important thing to remember when reading documents like this. Thank you for a most excellent summary.