LETTER TO THE EDITOR: WAS SMITH A STAGE THEORIST? A RESPONSE TO AHIAKPOR
Bibliographic record
Abstract
James Ahiakpor claims I am incorrect in my reading of Adam Smith when I suggest that Smith may not endorse, or may even reject, a four stages of development model, given his absence of historical example of any country that developed following the four stages, but rather that his descriptions of different stages look more like a taxonomy to describe different types of societies.I very much appreciate the time and energy Ahiakpor put on my work and I have no qualm about his reading of my paper.Since I was asked to reply to his detailed comments, I will.But only in a general, methodological, way.The beauty of Adam Smith's works, in my view, is their complexity and their multiple shades.I do not see Smith as a black and white writer but as someone who sees the gray areas.And his focus on the gray may be what allows centuries of debates and multiple, if not contradicting, interpretations.The way I see Smith is that he is aware of the complexity of economic phenomena, which may very well have multiple and possibly unknown causes and explanations.The role of the "philosopher," or social scientist, is to try to understand and elaborate them.But trying to understand them does not necessarily imply finding the one and only truth behind them, which, for Smith, may not be available to us, or not even be there.As Smith tells us in his History of Astronomy, we want to connect the dots, we want to come up with an explanation for things that happen around us.But there are different ways of connecting the same dots.And there may even be different dots to connect.And so, differently from THE Theory of Moral Sentiments, we do not have THE Theory of the Wealth of Nations, or THE Theory of the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.We have AN Inquiry into it.So, maybe presumptuously, I would hope I follow Smith's spirit of inquiring and simply offer a different way of connecting the dots from Ronald Meek or Ahiakpor, not the one and only correct way of understanding Smith.Scholars have given different emphases to different sentences or words in Smith.Ahiakpor emphasizes different words and different sentences from what I do.In a sense I completely agree with him that, in Smith, saving and the accumulation of capital are at the base of growth, or that different government policies will have a major effect in the development of a country.And I can also see how he "infers" (his word) a development in stages from it.But in my reading of Smith, I preferred to emphasize a different
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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 | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.030 | 0.032 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.005 |
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".