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
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".