A Penny for Your Thoughts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do communication costs affect the production of new ideas and inventions?To answer this question, we study the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in Great Britain in 1840.This reform replaced the previous system of expensive distance-based postage fees with a uniform low rate of one penny for sending letters anywhere in the country.The result was a large spatiallyvaried reduction in the cost of communicating across locations.We study the impact of this reform on the production of scientific knowledge using citation links constructed from a leading academic journal, the Philosophical Transactions, and the impact on the development of new technology using patent data.Our results provide quantitative causal estimates showing how a fall in communication costs can increase the rate at which scientific knowledge is exchanged and new ideas and technologies are developed.This evidence lends direct empirical support to an extensive theoretical literature in economic growth and urban economics positing that more ideas can emerge from communication between individuals.
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 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.123 | 0.055 |
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".