Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Economist by Christopher Grimes Greg Sanders (bio) THE ECONOMIST Christopher Grimes Spuyten Duyvil https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/the-economist.html 150 pages; Print, $18.00 Christopher Grimes's The Economist is a metafictional novel in the form of a proposal for a treatise analyzing deleterious economic and anthropological trends in the US and Canada during the COVID pandemic. That's a mouthful, but Grimes isn't messing around. The reader, who may be challenged by this setup, is rewarded with instances of brilliant writing and flits of insight that cut deep into the American (as in North American) psyche. Focused around the fictional border town of Freyman, North Dakota, a small community through which passes much of the haulage to and from the Bakken Formation frack pads, The Economist at first inundates the reader with a compendium of the various unhappy trends pertaining to immigration and the pandemic. It's as if the nameless (though not necessarily anonymous) narrator has been amassing and researching these complaints, and now plans to elucidate them one by tedious one, supporting each grim piece with data and citations, bringing this reader right up to the edge of a parapet. The metafictional framework allows Grimes leeway to make sweeping statements without typical novelistic buildups. We don't have to scale a linguistic hill to determine the narrator's message, because the message is all there is. Or messages, as there are many. Here are just a few of them: that in the US the COVID pandemic decimated the country's gross domestic product and spiked unemployment, while in Canada the gross domestic product grew and unemployment dropped so low that there was actually a labor shortage; that motor vehicles kill approximately 32.5 trillion insects per year; that older Canadians retiring in the US with their "costly geriatric afflictions" usurp US resources, while US members of the "professional class" that migrate north to cities like Vancouver add to the disequilibrium. Soon we're homing in on these "resident aliens" who "take advantage of various medical [End Page 69] interventions (i.e., bariatric procedures, joint replacements)" in the US. Before long, we will meet one. The writing, both careful and seamless, goes on for some time naming and explicating the various ways in which Canada seems to be putting one over on the US. Eventually the reader settles into the efficiency and even strange hilarity of the scheme as we abandon hope of a conventional narrative. And yet we soon discover a domestic drama at the center of this novel. Beneath the simmering and fragmentary exegeses, a sympathetic portrait emerges of a middle-class family "economically stranded in the wild west of the fracking boom, surrounded on all sides by the shudder of downshifting diesel engines at all hours of the day and night." The characters are not named, but the "jack-of-all trades" father seems suspiciously to be a stand-in for the narrator. His wife, a "practicing family physician," is frayed both physically and emotionally by the pandemic; their thirteen-year-old daughter seems to have found the perfect musical instrument to reflect her inner state, namely, "the infernal recorder, the harmonic range of which is so ultimately thin and flat as to render any composition an expression of ambivalence at best, at worst sheer annoyance"; and the maternal grandmother (the dreaded resident alien), who has come south from Canada to wind down her life in the family's North Dakota home, and is laid out corpse-like in front of the TV tuned to the Hallmark Channel. The family dog, Velcro, poor thing, carries at least as much metaphoric weight as any of the humans onstage. Domestic interludes act as the binding element of this novel, and many of the passages demonstrate that Grimes's talent transcends the clever recitation of statistics surrounding economics, or technical discussions on the mechanics of fracking. The writing can be tender and elusive, as when daughter and father discover that their local swimming spot is closed for the season, the water poisoned with fracking effluent: the girl "was standing there in her sandals and summer dress, the straps of her bikini drawn tight...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.007 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".