Bibliographic record
Abstract
In early 1841, William Thornton accepted an invitation to address the members of the Travellers’ Club on the divisive issue of the repeal of the Corn Laws. 1 Published later that year as The True Consequences of the Repeal of the Corn Laws (1841), Thornton’s pamphlet was part of a wider economic debate on agricultural protection, triggered by the publication of John R. McCulloch’s Statements Illustrative of the Policy and Probable Consequence of the Proposed Repeal of the Existing Corn Law (1841). 2 There, McCulloch (1841: 16, 7), a free trader, had advanced the view that British agriculturalists had “nothing to fear … from the total and unconditional repeal of the Corn Laws” because corn prices “would [not] sink … to the level of those on the continent” owing to the “considerable cost … of conveying a quarter of corn from Dantzic … to London”. 3 Free trader or not, Thornton had reckoned that McCulloch’s pamphlet was being deployed in the service of the political interests of a disproportionately powerful landed (i.e. aristocratic) order who feared that the abolition of an import tax on grain would increase foreign grain imports, lower the domestic price of grain, and so, reduce their income from agriculture. Thornton did not believe, however, that this situation would obtain and took aim at McCulloch’s estimates of the market price of grain across Europe, the effects of a free trade in grain and the cost of its “conveyance” to England: “Happily”, Thornton noted, “Mr. McCulloch’s opinion is not only utterly erroneous, but is founded on a sophism so gross and palpable, that one can only wonder how a reasoner, generally so acute and clear-sighted, has suffered it to mislead him” (Thornton 1841: 6). Even at this point, the first-time pamphleteer is prepared to make firm judgements about the views of seasoned economic commentators. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.235 | 0.195 |
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".