Review of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel and Jason Moore. 2017. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 328 pages, ISBN 978-0-5202-9993-1 Paper ($24.95)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of this book, as its title indicates, is to provide a guide to capitalism and its history through the lens of seven "cheap" things that are key to how the modern capitalist world was made.This guide is necessary, according to the authors, because an intellectual shift is imperative if humanity is to address what they call the "state shift" in the biosphere that climate change represents.Sadly, however, the authors note that the ecology that produced this state of affairs has also produced humans who "are ill-equipped to receive the news of this state shift," even to the point that "it's easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism" (2).Thus, the cultural hegemony that makes such destruction seem normal or inevitable must be challenged.The style and organization of the book are intended to move the discussion about how the current situation came to be and what can be done out of the academy, engaging a wider audience.The authors see it as "a contribution to an ongoing conversation about the fate of this planet" (xiii), but one that will disrupt and challenge "age-old verities"-hence, the catchy title reminiscent of myriads of simplistic self-help books and other popular guides to living that are sprinkled through best seller lists.Chapters are kept relatively short.Along with an introductory overview, there is a
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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".