Wealth and Inequality on Ontario’s Northwestern Frontier: Evidence from Probate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines a unique data set of 1,293 estates from probate records of the Thunder Bay District Surrogate Court for the period from 1885 to 1920. The data document a period of sustained growth spanning the years 1885 to 1906, an intense boom over the period from 1907 to 1913, and a post-boom “bust” over the years 1914 to 1920. Real average wealth in 1900 dollars during the boom period (1907– 1913) was almost 112 per cent higher than it had been in the previous period and approximately 95 per cent greater than during the post-1913 period. The boom was accompanied by a massive increase in wealth inequality, as the share of the top 10 per cent of wealth-holders rose from 66 to 75 per cent. While the average increases in wealth during the boom were greatest among the top fifth of wealth-holders, this group also sustained the greatest declines in wealth during the post-boom collapse. In addition, the post-boom collapse appears to have harmed women’s wealth-holding proportionately more than men’s, perhaps because of the greater propensity of women to hold their wealth in the form of mortgages.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".