The Promise of a More Abundant Life: Consumer society and the rise of the managerial state
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the decades following the turn of the century, the rising cost of living was a subject of controversy in Canada and throughout the industrialized world. No other topic, observers often noted, commanded more attention. Rising prices exacerbated wage disputes, and intensified tensions between traditional producer values and the acceptance of new patterns of purchasing. This article explores the bond formed between Canadian consumers and the managerial state by the investigation of changes in the cost of living. In order to measure changes in the prices of goods and services, it is necessary to examine the consumption practices of Canadians. This process of data collection and collation helped to normalize new consumer behaviours, and embedded the category of the Canadian citizen as a wage spender, as well as a wage earner, in the workings of government. By engaging with consumption, that is by representing, by measuring, and by categorizing the changing purchasing practices of its citizens, the state expanded its mandate and helped to shape the way Canadians came to see themselves as consumers.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".