Lost Institutional Memory and Policy Advice: The Royal Society of Arts on the Circular Economy Through the Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Circular economy theorists and advocates typically describe traditional market economies as linear “take, make, use and dispose” systems. Various policy interventions, from green taxes to extended producer responsibility, are therefore deemed essential to ensure the systematic (re)introduction of residuals, secondary materials and components in manufacturing activities. By contrast, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers documented how the profit motive, long-distance trade and actors now largely absent from present-day circularity discussions (e.g., waste dealers and brokers) spontaneously created ever more value out of the recovery of residuals and waste. These opposite assessments and underlying perspectives are perhaps best illustrated in the nineteenth classical liberal and early twenty-first century interventionist writings on circularity of Fellows, members and collaborators of the near tricentennial British Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. This article summarizes their respective contributions and compares their stance on market institutions, design, intermediaries, extended producer responsibility and long-distance trade. Some hypotheses as to the sources of their analytical discrepancies and current beliefs on resource recovery are then discussed in more detail. A final suggestion is made that, if the analysis offered by early contributors is more correct, then perhaps the most important step towards greater circularity is regulatory reform (or deregulation) that would facilitate the spontaneous recovery of residuals and their processing in the most suitable, if sometimes more distant, locations.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.025 | 0.026 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 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; 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".