Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 1950s Lionel Robbins was in his fifties. There were family anxieties but his life at the School was easier than in the late 1940s. He shed the burden of many LSE committees but took on others outside the School. Although he left himself little time to write, it was in this decade that he published two of his lasting contributions to his discipline as well as a collection of essays, an edition of a classic in the history of economic thought and a dozen articles or published lectures. This chapter concentrates on his varied activities in the first half of the decade. On 15 February 1950 Robbins wrote Ludwig Lachmann in South Africa (Letters to and from Economists 1.1.49-August 1950, RP): ‘Affairs here at the School are now very satisfactory. The staff is at least almost equal to the increased demands which are made upon us, and some of the younger recruits are of authentic vintage quality. We have had some seminars recently which were quite up to pre-war standards.’ He wrote Baumol on 21 February that the School was ‘rather dead this year’ (Baumol Papers): Not that the Seminar is bad; we miss you but Ralph [Turvey] and the younger people are very good & the adoption of special techniques have jolted the graduates into greater participation. But…the building contract for our new common room which was to have been completed by the autumn is not completed yet & shows no sign of approaching that stage. Hence we have no common room & very little common life except at coffee after lunch…This is very bad for us all & especially bad for the new arrivals of whom there are many for it is a complete toss up whether they ever meet anybody outside their own department at all.’ He had ‘reorganized’ his own life: ‘I spend Mondays & Tuesday mornings at home & refuse to come down for anyone short of the Director. In this way I have been able to do quite a respectable amount of work & I am not feeling quite so much at the fag end of life as heretofore.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".