Should We Listen to the Churches When they Speak on Economic Issues?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
NON-AGENDAWith the view of causing an increase to take place in the mass of national wealth, or with a view to increase of the means either of subsistence or enjoyment, without some special reason, the general rule is, that nothing ought to be done or attempted by government.The motto, or watchword of government, on these occasions, ought to be Be quiet...Whatever measures, therefore, cannot be justified as exceptions to that rule, may be considered as non-agenda on the part of government. Jeremy Bentham (c.1801) Should We Listen to the Churches When They Speak on Economic Issues? Anthony Watermanconomists are often derided for having two hands.I am sorry to say that I need sixteen hands in order to answer the question I have been given today.Even when I admit that some can be doubled up, I still have eight.I have no wish to bore you with taxonomy.But I must begin with a little rough-andready analysis.When Christian churches 'speak' on economic issues, their utterance may be either 'strong' or 'weak'.I mean by 'strong' an imperative statement by chief pastors or other authorized spokesmen, supposed to be based upon the teaching authority of the church, and addressed to all in a position to do something about it.I mean by 'weak' simply the expression of opinion by authorised spokesmen, or the offer of advice, or a call to 'dialogue'.Even a 'weak' statement, to be attended to at all, must rest upon authority of some kind.But not the high and mighty magisterium invoked by the Bishops of Rome in promulgating the 'social encyclicals'.Rather the merely human authority possessed by any who speak on behalf of some significant interest group, profession or non-government organization in modern society.The putative authority possessed by the Christian churches -whether strong or weak -may be used either to instruct or exhort the world at large, and especially those with power in their respective societies; or to instruct only such of the faithful as acknowledge and defer to that authority.We see an example of the former in the words used by Pope Pius XI to describe the achievement of his great
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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 | 0.024 | 0.120 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.039 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.009 |
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".