Retrospectives: Trouble in the Inaugural Issue of the <i>American Economic Review</i>: The Cross/Eaves Controversy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The papers from the first year of the American Economic Review are included in the Archives of the American Economic Association. While researching the early years of the AEA, Ann Mari May came across a folder marked "Controversies, Criticisms, etc."-which stood out in the midst of a review of AEA minutes and reports. This folder included a bulky file on what AER Editor Davis Rich Dewey would come to refer to as the "Cross/Eaves Controversy"-a controversy that, according to a letter he wrote, would give him "no end of trouble." The trouble erupted with a book review that appeared in the first issue of the American Economic Review. The review, written by Ira Cross, addressed a book by Lucile Eaves entitled A History of California Labor Legislation. The controversy that ensued illustrates the eternally fascinating interaction of the reviewer and the reviewed and casts a revealing light on the era's standards and rituals of scholarly conduct, on the drawing of disciplinary boundaries as economics became a more distinct academic discipline, and on the differing treatment of men and women in the academic life of the time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.060 | 0.201 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.005 |
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".