Occasionally The Economist publishes nice graphs capturing social and economic trends. Here is one.
It is part of a nice article
The downward trend in the humanities and social sciences is dramatic and perhaps not surprising.
I was surprised that in the natural sciences the trend wasn't worse. The Flesch reading ease score goes from about 26 around 1960 to about 18 today.
However, this metric misses a lot. It only measures the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word. Thus, it is not sensitive to the amount of technical jargon or to overall clarity.
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