A Malthusian-Frontier Interpretation of United States Demographic History Before c. 1815
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The combination of a three per cent rate of population growth and an absence of per capita economic growth was fundamental to the history of the British colonies in North America and the early United States. These characteristics sharply differed from the economy and demography of the nineteenth century United States and from the experience of other societies. These distinctive features had significant consequences; the "Malthusian-frontier" regime helps to explain the extremely slow pace of urbanization, the stability in the inequality of wealth, and the pattern of conflict and elite domination in politics. Although rapid natural increase created economic, social, and political difficulties, migration toward the frontier served to equilibrate the system. Using data from late eighteenth century New England towns, the paper demonstrates how migration tended to act as a homeostatic mechanism but also argues that out-migrants from more densely-settled areas were pushed rather than pulled. Several factors account for the "stickiness" of the migration process. Throughout, the essay illustrates the utility of a systemic approach to demographic history.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".