Power and Organization in the Making of the Long Twentieth Century: A Response to J. Bradford DeLong’s <i>Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Professor DeLong has clearly been thinking about the ideas in this book for a long time.Even from reading the blurbs on the back cover, there is a strong subtext of "damn, took you long enough!" that is detectable.Fortunately, it was worth the wait.It is hard to think of a better place to discuss this book than the Palmer House Hilton.First opened in September 1870, its existence maps perfectly onto DeLong's idea of the "long twentieth century."It is of course located in Chicago, a city that embodies the transformations at the heart of the book.The Palmer House is a product of the first Gilded Age when economic takeoff and technological innovations made possible a standard of living for some that was previously unthinkable.It was Chicago's first hotel with elevators, and the first hotel with electric light bulbs and telephones in the guest roomsproducts of the industrial research labs of the time.It also had ostentatious symbols of old-school opulence, like a barbershop whose floor was tiled entirely in silver dollars.Chicago businessman Potter Palmer had the Palmer House built as a wedding gift for his young bride, Bertha Honoré.So it was a symbol of his vast personal wealth and, by extension, symbolic of the vast wealth inequality that characterized the era.It was also a symbol of the ownership structures of the time, with individual "robber barons" controlling vast holdings.Palmer rebuilt the hotel on the same site in 1925, the heart of the Roaring Twenties, just before the Great Depression.Then, in 1945, right as the postwar expansion was taking off, the Palmer House was sold to the Hilton Hotels corporationanother of DeLong's key modern innovations.Thereafter, it became one part of that larger global entity, which itself was a key node in the global travel infrastructure that made modern hyperglobalization possible.Then, in a nice coda that embodies the neoliberal turn at the end of the book, the Palmer House was sold off in 2005 to Thor Equities, a New York-based private equity firm, although Hilton Worldwide Holdings, Inc. continues to manage the property.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".