Paths of Institutional Development: A View from Economic History
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article surveys an influential new research program on historical paths of institutional development and their consequences for growth. The research program exploits the experience of European colonialism as a natural experiment whose results bear on the way institutions affect development. The central hypothesis of this research is that societies that began with more extreme inequality were more likely to develop institutions allowing much of the population only limited access to economic opportunities. The research has uncovered a striking “reversal of fortune”: among the areas colonized by Europe, those that were relatively rich in the 1600s are today far poorer than the areas (such as the United States and Canada) that initially were viewed as relatively undesirable. The timing of the reversal—at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, when there was probably a premium on broad participation in commercial activity—suggests that institutions associated with high inequality may be a causal factor in low aggregate incomes. This research program is still at an early stage. But studies of institutions in India using data rich enough to permit hypothesis-testing provide evidence
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it