Price Laws and Items of Convenience: An Inquiry Into the Question of “Ancient Middle Class”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The main goal of this study is to make ancient economic data accessible to students and scholars of business and economics. It also demonstrates the capacity of classical and neoclassical economics for making theoretical contributions to economic history and anthropology. Primary data are drawn from Iraq and Iran between the sixth century BCE and the seventh century CE, with comparisons taken from the Mediterranean. Convenience is a useful concept for locating a middle class or an “intermediate economic group” in ancient societies. Symbolically, convenience may be understood through the notion of “item of convenience,” which is necessary for creating an intermediate economic group. Convenience is also associated with comfort, which is only available to the elite and those intermediate economic groups who have access to limited surplus and are engaged in production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. Ancient price laws, which were intended to protect buyers and sellers, testify to institutional intervention among a group of people who were freely engaged in market conduct and desired a more convenient access to fair market prices.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".