www.vanderbilt.edu/econ Social Saving of the Panama Canal
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seminar at Vanderbilt University for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors. Social Saving of the Panama Canal At the time when the Panama Canal was handed over to Panama, most people believed that the Canal was of little material worth to the United States. However, what was the value of this canal to the United States in the 1920s? We estimate the social savings generated by the Panama Canal for the United States in 1924 in order to assess the contribution it made to the social welfare of the United States. We estimate the direct social savings that resulted from lower shipping costs for both international and coastwise trade. Additionally, we estimate the benefits from two sources of indirect social savings. The first was generated as a result of the expansion of the feasible market area, due to reduced transport costs. The second source of indirect social savings is what we refer to as the pro-competitive effect of the competition between the water shipping via the Panama Canal and shipping via the transcontinental railroad. We argue that this competition resulted in lower freight rates for all railroad traffic due to the way in which the Interstate Commerce Commission regulated railroad freight rates. Estimates of total social saving range from 0.58 percent of GNP to 1.97 percent of GNP in 1924. Even the lower estimate of social saving is a value that is one quarter larger than the total cost of acquiring the land and constructing the Panama Canal. 2 1
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it