Are Mormons Bankrupting Utah? Evidence from the Bankruptcy Courts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Are Mormons to blame for Utah’s chart-topping bankruptcy rates? If this query makes readers feel uncomfortable, we think it should. There is something disturbing about applying certain traits that appear to lead to bankruptcy to a whole religious group. Admittedly, Mormonism is more demographically and geographically diverse, and Utah’s bankruptcy dilemma more complex, than suggested by this question. Yet this question lurks in much of the discussion, among Mormons and non-Mormon’s alike, regarding Utah’s incredibly high bankruptcy rate. Still more disturbing is the readiness to attempt to answer the “Mormon question” without asking it openly. For years, researchers and pundits indirectly addressed this question by using other characteristics unique to Utah as proxies for religious adherence in an effort to address the question everyone is asking: Are Mormons bankrupting Utah? Unlike previous research regarding Utah’s bankruptcy rate, this study openly asks whether Mormons are the driving force behind Utah’s bankruptcy rate. With the increase in bankruptcy rates in the past decade, the question of who files for bankruptcy and why has become much more pressing. Even before the extraordinary run up in bankruptcy filings in advance of changes in the law in 2005, each year about one in every seventy-six families in the United States headed to the bankruptcy courts. Evidence suggests that these families were solidly middle class, and not some distant, chronically-poor segment of society. Recent studies point to the increase in bankruptcies among families
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.002 |
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".