The Hidden Face of Consumption: Extending Credit to the Urban Masses in Montreal (1920s–40s)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to many historians and sociologists, mass consumption did not arrive in Canada until the 1950s or even the 1960s. However, this article shows that consumption by low-wage earners in the Canadian metropolis of Montreal was already beginning to transform and expand during the interwar period. As much as consumers, government helped drive these changes by relaxing the legal framework regulating credit practices as well as relations between small debtors and their creditors. The growing use of consumer credit by working-class families was at the heart of these transformations. In this article, the files of depositors placed under the protection of the Lacombe Act provide a unique window on this phenomenon and associated consumer behaviours. An analysis of public debates on the consumer habits of urban workers offers additional insight and context. We advocate for a broad understanding of consumer credit, while rejecting the familiar dichotomy between the consumption of durable goods and the purchase of basic necessities. Necessities and luxuries are constructs that have evolved over time, and the Lacombe files highlight how low-income households combined different sources of credit to incorporate and balance these two types of expenses within their tight budgets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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 teacher head, 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".