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Autocracy and Stagnation: How Imperial Exams Shaped China's Destiny

88 points by pseudolus 2y ago

pseudolus 2y ago
Interesting parallel with our own modern day society - ostensibly meritocratic but preparation for the imperial exams began at the age of 3-4, the practical effect being that the well off were already advantaged. Similar to our present age where the well off can afford to allocate resources for their preschoolers that the less well off simply don't have. In both instances a class perpetuates itself.
- euroderf 2y ago
  What I've read is: Income and (nuclear) family size are inversely correlated, and one explanation for this is that as income increases, the total cost of an additional child increases in relative terms. Put another way: phenomena like the preschool rat race mean each child takes a larger portion of your income than it does at lower levels of income.
  - psychoslave 2y ago
    But children education is not a nuclear family issue, it’s a societal infrastructure matter. If you have more children, you can’t give the same amount of individual love and care to each. That said they can give love and care to each others, though not with the same level of experience and self-control as (some) adults can do. Yes love and care are tremendously important to foster mentally healthy people. But this alone won’t teach them literacy, swimming, mastering of self attention, math, music, biology, active listening, critical thinking, humility, sane cooperation at scale, and so on. For all that you need a safe generous educative environment that could be logistically scaled to all humans but that we will fail to put in place as we let the most capricious wealth-drainers deteriorate harmony in societies.
  - ip26 2y ago
    That’s hard for me to wrap my head around. I have friends who want a second kid but worry about whether they could still pay their mortgage and buy food. No wealthy family is worrying about that. The cost of raising a kid might go up with income, but probably not at the same slope as income, which would mean they get cheaper in relative terms. My attempt to explain would be a high income family aim to provide their kids the same opportunity, and they know with seven children they won’t be able to provide the personal attention to provide that. For example, consider how parental involvement in a child’s schooling is the number one predictor of educational outcome. Well, you can’t spend thirty minutes each night helping each of seven kids with their homework.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      > That’s hard for me to wrap my head around. You seem to be trying to model social phenomena as linear functions. That's going to fail on almost every time. The GP is also claiming monotonic behavior. Please understand it as constrained into a "reasonable" interval that he didn't disclaim. Otherwise it certainly won't hold either.
    - mmsimanga 2y ago
      In my observation kids with older siblings tend to develop faster. As in they walk at an earlier age. I guess they get fed up with watching the older kids running around and being left behind. Older kids also often act as deputy parents. So I don't think kids from large families surfer from attention deficit. I am a single dad and often struggle to keep my child attention right through the day.
    - labcomputer 2y ago
      > No wealthy family is worrying about that. They are, but in a different way. They worry if they can still afford to pay the mortgage while also paying for a second daycare/preschool tuition and then later a second private school tuition. > The cost of raising a kid might go up with income, but probably not at the same slope as income, which would mean they get cheaper in relative terms. FAFSA allows colleges to perform perfect price discrimination, so the cost of raising a kid through college absolutely goes up with the same slope as income. When colleges know you have significant retirement savings and a high income, your kids will get zero financial aid.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  "For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'of their own accord entered the assembly of the gods'; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." (Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Part IV) And here we are, with all these automatons, but still with a societies that prepare people for more slavery systems anyway.
  - throwaway4aday 2y ago
    we're still very far away from complete automation. one person now can do the work of 10 or 100 workmen in the past but people are still needed to transport and set up the feed stock, monitor, configure and service the machines, remove, inspect and assemble the finished products, on and on there are so many other tasks that only a general purpose agent like a human can do. you could construct an assembly line that is so completely integrated that it can almost run untended except for maintenance and recovery from failures but it will only ever produce exactly one model of one product and if you even need to change the weight of one of the parts it produces and then assembles you'll need to manually reconfigure a good deal of it creating significant down time. it doesn't help that we impede the progress of automation by outsourcing labour overseas where the cost of labour makes manual processes still viable or by importing temporarily cheap labour until they realize they're getting a raw deal and move up the ladder with everyone else. if we want to develop the technology needed to alleviate the burden of manual labour then we have to disallow these temporary quick fixes. if we do nothing they'll run their course in a few decades anyways, it'll just be a slow walk to the same destination giving the people who are acting in exploitative ways ample time to stuff their coffers with the fruits of their schemes while letting the rest of society rot on the vine mere steps away from the solution that would benefit everyone.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  > In principle, membership in these three groups [proles, outer party, inner party] is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. —EG Sounds like Winston Smith wound up in the Outer Party due to poor A level results?
- deleted 2y ago
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- ThrowawayR2 2y ago
  > "Similar to our present age where the well off can afford to allocate resources for their preschoolers that the less well off simply don't have." A talking point endlessly repeated by those trying to push an agenda but those of us who climbed the ranks from poverty because the children of the well off chose not take advantage of the privilege they had and instead chose to be indolent would beg to differ. Meritocracy is alive and well, thank you very much.
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    This effect would be much smaller if there were a high-quality, free-at-point-of-service state education system. When you have to privately school or tutor or homeschool children to get them to learn things like reading [1], having extra resources at your disposal is a much bigger lever. [1] https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
- jajko 2y ago
  Its a bit tiring to read similar utopistic comments so often here. Completely unhinged in reality, utterly ignoring human nature, disregarding whole human history and so on. No solution to anything in sight, just complains about unfairness. I know its an easy position in life, but its a lazy one. But what about some concrete, achievable realistic steps to improve current situation even further? Or even better, what about bringing less fortunate parts of the world at least to this, apparently still miserable level? Now that would be an interesting discussion.
  - keybored 2y ago
    > Completely unhinged in reality, utterly ignoring human nature, disregarding whole human history and so on. Unhinged from any concrete counter-critique, latching on to nebulous nonsense like “human nature”, hand-waves towards “whole human history” as if that means anything. That’s your comment.
- labcomputer 2y ago
  > preparation for the imperial exams began at the age of 3-4, the practical effect being that the well off were already advantaged. This reminds me of the recent experiments with dropping standardized tests (or making them optional) for college admissions. The critics bemoaned the advantage that rich kids had when studying for the exams... but when colleges temporarily switched to essay writing, grades and extracurriculars as the bar for admission, the incoming class was even more heavily skewed to rich kids. It turns out that rich kids have much less of an advantage on standardized exams than any other form of evaluation. The standardized test, scored by an anonymous grader, still requires you to know some things and to engage your brain. Being born to rich parents (or members of the imperial court) doesn't automatically give you passing scores... You still have to work for them.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Most of the people who wanted standardized testing done away with knew exactly what was going to happen. They knew that asian immigrant families in particular did well on standardized testing and hoped to keep them down by shifting the focus of admissions to BS like sports and after school club participation. It wasn't an accident, it was the intent from the start.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > The critics bemoaned the advantage that rich kids had when studying for the exams... but when colleges temporarily switched to essay writing, grades and extracurriculars as the bar for admission, the incoming class was even more heavily skewed to rich kids. Was there some mechanism to ensure/confirm that the scoring for those remaining factors didn't get changed during the process? I imagine someone judging an essay or extracurricular activities would behave differently if they thought it mattered a lot versus whether they thought it was just a tiebreaker to apply after a standardized test.
- slibhb 2y ago
  How much does "allocating resources for preschoolers" actually matter? My sense is not a whole lot. The West is fairly meritocratic. The attempt to deny this is catastrophizing e.g. "everything is awful and unfair." And in practice, critics of Western meritocracy have mainly had a negative effect by erroding the good things we do have.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Certainly primary schooling has much much much larger effects than university. I'm not sure if preschools matter though.
- wnc3141 2y ago
  In a gold rush, those with the diamond shovels will go further. The only way to no perpetuate class is to not have access to the consumer class depend on a certain selection of jobs. The problem is the size of the middle class, not the selectivity of participating in the middle class.
- deleted 2y ago
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- derbOac 2y ago
  The fundamental problem imho is that standardized tests, which start out as well-intended, start to replace actual skills as a focus of interest. This is especially problematic when the tests are only correlated 0.1-0.4 with whatever is actually of interest. The tail starts to wag the dog. One common example of this is in policy discussions about the tests, where figures tend to only present means, with no variances or scatterplots. I remember this, for instance, from a report at Dartmouth not too long ago arguing for the use of standardized tests, where the authors only presented means, and not the huge variances around them which is really the heart of the issue. It starts to become especially problematic when people get canalized into lifetime paths based on essentially invalid measures, especially when the targets themselves are changeable. "Meritocracy" starts to become sort of a misnomer at that point. Of course, relying on anything too heavily starts to be an issue, and tests are a source of information. But when you start to overrely on anything, or rely on it to an extent that is empirically unwarranted, you start to have problems institutionally and societally.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > "Meritocracy" starts to become sort of a misnomer at that point. Even if the variance is so high that it becomes a lottery, it still looks better than any alternative people have come up with.
- lordnacho 2y ago
  I see it as a sort of leaky inheritance. The Duke of Westminster is going to pass Mayfair down to his kids forever, but the CEO of Google can only do so much for his kids. In all likelihood, they will be well educated but never get the top seat at this kind of corporation. If you couldn't pass down anything, eg if you had to put your kids in the same schools as everyone else and not give them any advantage, it would seem to be against our instincts as parents. Yet it also isn't good for society if we gave guarantees.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Duke of Westminster is worth like $12B, and Sundar Pichal is worth almost $1B which is much less but still generational wealth. The CEO of Google is kept in line by the founders who keep control with dual class stock options though.
- kragen 2y ago
  you say: > the practical effect being that the well off were already advantaged. ... In both instances a class perpetuates itself. by contrast, the article says: > You could be a farmer, and then you took the exam, you succeeded, and then you became an official. So in that sense, it’s not social mobility, it is political mobility. > Ilari Mäkelä: But there was genuine political mobility. > Yasheng Huang: Oh, absolutely. > Ilari Mäkelä: How would you convince a skeptic of that? > Yasheng Huang: Very easily. Again, going back to our earlier conversation about data, this is not something you can just use stories to illustrate. You kind of have to use statistics and data. An earlier historian, Ping-ti Ho 何炳棣 who really pioneered research on the keju showed that it was meritocratic. There are later historians who study keju, and they say, “Oh, so-and-so came from a prominent family, and he also succeeded. He got promoted.” But the problem with that is, how do you know it is the prominent family part that contributed to his mobility? Maybe he was extremely smart. > I’m not saying that the second view is necessarily wrong, but all I’m saying is that just telling that story itself is not convincing enough to make your point. In my work with Clair Yang from the University of Washington, we ran statistical tests to determine the effect of family backgrounds on exam performance. Whether or not you came from a rich family, whether or not you came from a politically prominent family, your father was a government official, your grandfather was a government official. Statistically, if that background influenced your exam score, we should be able to see it. We should be able to detect that effect in the statistical results we generate. > Indeed, because you had three rounds, in the first two rounds that were anonymized, we didn’t see any effect of family backgrounds on exam scores. That’s quite impressive — going back to the 6th century, 7th century, 9th century, and 13th centuries — that your backgrounds didn’t influence your exam scores. it sounds like you disagree with dr. huang's research conclusions, but you don't seem to be offering any argument against them, just bare contradiction
harimau777 2y ago
There was also an official exam for becoming a military officer. One part of it was manipulating an extremely heavy guan dao (which is likely where the stories of Guan Yu wielding a pole arm between 40 and 90 lbs come from). Training for the test is still around in the cultural practices of some people groups in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqnulYO5890 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqnulYO5890
- lupusreal 2y ago
  I have seen some pictures of PLA soldiers aiming their rifles with weights hanging off the end of the barrel. I wonder if this is a distance relative of that old practice.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > aiming their rifles with weights hanging off the end of the barrel That sounds like it has a practical explanation: Strengthening certain muscle-groups so that the soldiers won't easily tire of handling their weapon. It might be even better if the rifle had a laser on it, so that the exercise involves not just lifting the barrel but also centering it onto a target. (However shooting live-rounds could metaphorically backfire, since users would be getting trained to expect the wrong recoil.)
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  And the manchurian qing dynasty had a test where you had to be able to draw a 300 plus pound composite recurve bow! Which folks were still doing in the 20th century!
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    Edit I was mistaken: https://www.mandarinmansion.com/glossary/wuke-gong-wukegong https://www.mandarinmansion.com/glossary/wuke-gong-wukegong These military exam bows went up to 160 lbs. In at least one instance a 240 lbs bow was manufactured which a single elite archer was able to pull
aebtebeten 2y ago
...yes, there is that incredible mobility. You could be a farmer, and then you took the exam, you succeeded, and then you became an official. So in that sense, it’s not social mobility, it is political mobility. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_14 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa... > In the language of Vilfredo Pareto, this would probably be termed "capture of the rising elite"; in the language of present-day Marxists, this would be described as "utilization of potential leadership cadres from historically superseded classes"; in the language of practical politics, it means "cut in the smart boys from the opposition, so that they can't set up a racket of their own." –PMAL
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Stem0037 2y ago
I'm skeptical of some of the claims about technological innovation being higher during periods of fragmentation. Correlation doesn't equal causation - there could be other factors at play. Still, an intriguing hypothesis worth exploring further.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  War is a well known factor for innovation, and it tends to go together with periods of fragmentation. Probably less innovation than a war against a rival external power.
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    This is one of those claims that people tend to repeat without giving any evidence. Seems like there's some sort of attempt using Needham's data.
    - logicchains 2y ago
      There was a lot more innovation in Europe, particularly in military technology, in the 17th-19th centuries, due to many smaller states competing against each-other, compared to the Ottoman Empire and China. That's why Europe was able to so easily subjugate China.
      - qwytw 2y ago
        > to many smaller states competing against each-other, compared to the Ottoman Empire and China Did wars really have a positive impact on that though? I don't think the 30 years war etc. had such a positive impact, rather it probably slowed down progress by quite a bit.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    It could easily be the other way around; new technology leading to new wars as nations feel empowered by their new toys to act on their ambitions. The first world war occurred shortly after the introduction of smokeless powder and machine guns. These inventions were certainly funded by some military spending and perhaps even prompted by earlier wars, but in large part they were technologies who's time had come; precision manufacturing and chemical technology had only made these things possible shortly before they were invented. The development of "smart bombs" like the Walleye television bomb happened about as soon as they were technologically feasible; the idea for a fire-and-forget television bomb came from an engineer who was playing around with a new model of commercial TV camera. Emboldened by these new weapons, American politicians started wars which previously they might have considered too politically costly if they had to be fought using older methods. Desert Storm particularly.
est 2y ago
Contrary to popular belief, the original Keju (imperial exam) wasn't designed to select talented folks from commoners, but rather a royal ranking system to reduce the voilent political fights between noble houses during the Great DEI era of Wei-Jin-Northern-Southern states, when lots of deadly racial conflicts happenning in east asia for centuries. The's a saying "寒门出贵子", big names rise from small houses, yet it requires a house to rise from.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Which Huang also points out in his book "Rise of the E.A.S.T", which this article is directly referencing. The Keju system helped minimize the risk of military intervention in politics along with the internal fights amongst power clans and families, but at the expense of innovation due to ossification. Highly recommend reading anything by Yasheng Huang or Yuhua Wang about the development of Chinese administrative capacity.
- msabalau 2y ago
  Yeah, the examination system may have been an elegant way for emperors to prevent consolidation of power among the gentry. But it really seems a stretch in the interview say the exam system provided political mobility to farmers. The exams required an absurd amount of dedicated study. That someone like Fan Zhongyan could overcome his privileged family falling into difficult circumstances and have the opportunity to rise to heights as the result of success in exams shows a certain amount of meritocratic mobility within elites, but that's not all the same thing as the exams being about recruiting talent from commoners.
  - godelski 2y ago
    > The exams required an absurd amount of dedicated study. This is a problem in general with trying to achieve meritocracy. These merit based tests only work when all things are equal. Like you're suggesting, a noble has time to dedicate to studying while a farmer must work much harder since they cannot abandon their means of putting food on the table. I don't think this means we shouldn't try to make our societies more meritocratic, but I think a lot of people miss key points like this. The assumptions underlying the idea. Especially with survivor bias and that there will always be examples of those who overcame their disadvantages. But it's critical to understand these if we're actually to progress towards are more meritocratic society than we are now. [Side note] I do often wonder why we equate recognizing an advantage as diminishing the hard work one needs even when advantaged. Especially since our stories are the hero's journey and a critical retirement from that is meeting a wizard to get a magical power. Be it in The Matrix Neo's natural talent, Luke Skywalker being born a powerful Jedi, or King Author's sword and help from Merlin, we don't see these as tainting the struggles they overcome or diminishing their efforts. But we do when it's stories about ourselves.
decafninja 2y ago
IIRC, there was discussion comparing these exams to the leetcode hazing rituals that comprise tech interviews today.
- Discordian93 2y ago
  Spain has civil service exams and people can spend years after university preparing for them, full time, the official syallbi from the public service are tens of thousands of pages long. I don't think leetcode is anywhere near that arduous.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Is the knowledge practical in any way? Or largely irrelevant in the day to day? Is there a modern justification for such an onerous process? I am all for well trained professionals, but at some point people have to recognize gate keeping. Years of full time study is an impossible ask for many without external support.
    - throwaway2203 2y ago
      My friends who studied for the Pakistan Civil Service exam told me you can get questions like: When did Gen Musharraf visit India on so-and-so trip? A) Oct 10th 2004 B) Oct 8th 2004 ... (I made the answers up, but I distinctly remember the days being 2 days apart)
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        Is cheating rampant? I do not understand how a “test” like this can work where any irrelevant piece of trivia is fair game.
      - tdeck 2y ago
        The Indian Railway exam has questions like this too. Here are some examples from previous years: https://prepp.in/rrb-recruitment-exam/practice-papers https://prepp.in/rrb-recruitment-exam/practice-papers > 1. In Computers, what does ALU stand for? > 5. BJP had won how many seats in the Lok Sabha election 2019? > 20. In which of the following states of India is the Moatsu festival celebrated? > 51. Who among the following was the first cricket player to win Arjun Award? > 62. Which is the shortest part of small intestine? I have heard that the only way to pass is to know someone who can give you the questions in advance.
nabla9 2y ago
Great podcast and great episode. Keiju system was a tool for the emperor, not for the ruling classes. The first two rounds were anonymized and in the highest level exam the gentry performed worse than those coming from lower ranks. The incentive for the emperor was not to allow potential competition into high offices. It was meritocratic, but it also homogenized the ideology and stifled innovation.
Apocryphon 2y ago
A previous discussion about the exams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888398
LarsDu88 2y ago
Interestingly enough, standardized testing was unknown to Europe until they made contact with China. One company that was inspired by this was the British East India company which introduced an exam for employees. This contributed to the company becoming the largest most powerful corporation in the world! Down to running private militaries and overthrowing kingdoms. At one point the company's private armies were 3x larger than the British military. As for China itself, it kept doing these exams, but the content never changed. Straight into the 20th century the scholar exam involved memorizing Confucian classics. There was even a military exam that wasn't killed until the first decade of the 20th century. It involved being able to hit multiple targets with a bow and arrow whilst riding a horse, and being able to draw a 300 lb bow without straining your shoulders.
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  So for all ya'll software companies... one day it might be prudent to update these leetcode problems... With quizzes about tensors, Einstein summation, and recent scientific papers
- neaden 2y ago
  I think there must be a conversion issue there. An English Longbow topped out at like, 110 lb draw weight I don't think you could make a 300 lb bow, and if you did I don't think anyone could draw it without straining their shoulders.
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    Here are the historical draw weights for Qing dynasty bows: https://www.manchuarchery.org/historical-draw-weights-qing-bows https://www.manchuarchery.org/historical-draw-weights-qing-b.... 80 lbs was considered minimum for military usage and 150 lbs was not unheard of Imperial examination bows were giant versions of these military bows that were intended to assess the strength of the examinee. I couldn't find reliable numbers on the draw weights for these, but needless to say they had to have significantly higher draw weights than standard military bows. Even the Qing Emperor was expected to be able to draw a 120 lb+ bow or at least had such bows in his personal collection. The Manchurians came from a culture that valued hunting and horseback archery even more than the Han Chinese.
082349872349872 2y ago
> Surprisingly, candidates from wealthy families performed worse during this round. This is counterintuitive, especially when compared to contemporary educational systems where socioeconomic background often correlates positively with educational access and performance. Our research revealed a negative correlation in imperial China. > We attribute this to the emperor’s reluctance to appoint officials from independent power bases to central government positions. The final round selected the most important officials for the imperial court - those who would design future keju examinations, advise the government, and have direct access to the emperor. This system effectively marginalized the nobility and successful merchants. This is a pretty brilliant mechanism: an emperor normally draws a certain amount of jealousy and hate from the nobility and successful merchants, but by promoting rustic wonks over them via this system, might the emperor have been playing "let's you and him fight": diverting their animosity onto a bunch of "academic, gate-keeping, elites"?

88 points by pseudolus 2y ago

Interesting parallel with our own modern day society - ostensibly meritocratic but preparation for the imperial exams began at the age of 3-4, the practical effect being that the well off were already advantaged. Similar to our present age where the well off can afford to allocate resources for their preschoolers that the less well off simply don't have. In both instances a class perpetuates itself.

euroderf 2y ago
What I've read is: Income and (nuclear) family size are inversely correlated, and one explanation for this is that as income increases, the total cost of an additional child increases in relative terms. Put another way: phenomena like the preschool rat race mean each child takes a larger portion of your income than it does at lower levels of income.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  But children education is not a nuclear family issue, it’s a societal infrastructure matter. If you have more children, you can’t give the same amount of individual love and care to each. That said they can give love and care to each others, though not with the same level of experience and self-control as (some) adults can do. Yes love and care are tremendously important to foster mentally healthy people. But this alone won’t teach them literacy, swimming, mastering of self attention, math, music, biology, active listening, critical thinking, humility, sane cooperation at scale, and so on. For all that you need a safe generous educative environment that could be logistically scaled to all humans but that we will fail to put in place as we let the most capricious wealth-drainers deteriorate harmony in societies.
- ip26 2y ago
  That’s hard for me to wrap my head around. I have friends who want a second kid but worry about whether they could still pay their mortgage and buy food. No wealthy family is worrying about that. The cost of raising a kid might go up with income, but probably not at the same slope as income, which would mean they get cheaper in relative terms. My attempt to explain would be a high income family aim to provide their kids the same opportunity, and they know with seven children they won’t be able to provide the personal attention to provide that. For example, consider how parental involvement in a child’s schooling is the number one predictor of educational outcome. Well, you can’t spend thirty minutes each night helping each of seven kids with their homework.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > That’s hard for me to wrap my head around. You seem to be trying to model social phenomena as linear functions. That's going to fail on almost every time. The GP is also claiming monotonic behavior. Please understand it as constrained into a "reasonable" interval that he didn't disclaim. Otherwise it certainly won't hold either.
  - mmsimanga 2y ago
    In my observation kids with older siblings tend to develop faster. As in they walk at an earlier age. I guess they get fed up with watching the older kids running around and being left behind. Older kids also often act as deputy parents. So I don't think kids from large families surfer from attention deficit. I am a single dad and often struggle to keep my child attention right through the day.
  - labcomputer 2y ago
    > No wealthy family is worrying about that. They are, but in a different way. They worry if they can still afford to pay the mortgage while also paying for a second daycare/preschool tuition and then later a second private school tuition. > The cost of raising a kid might go up with income, but probably not at the same slope as income, which would mean they get cheaper in relative terms. FAFSA allows colleges to perform perfect price discrimination, so the cost of raising a kid through college absolutely goes up with the same slope as income. When colleges know you have significant retirement savings and a high income, your kids will get zero financial aid.
psychoslave 2y ago
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'of their own accord entered the assembly of the gods'; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." (Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Part IV) And here we are, with all these automatons, but still with a societies that prepare people for more slavery systems anyway.
- throwaway4aday 2y ago
  we're still very far away from complete automation. one person now can do the work of 10 or 100 workmen in the past but people are still needed to transport and set up the feed stock, monitor, configure and service the machines, remove, inspect and assemble the finished products, on and on there are so many other tasks that only a general purpose agent like a human can do. you could construct an assembly line that is so completely integrated that it can almost run untended except for maintenance and recovery from failures but it will only ever produce exactly one model of one product and if you even need to change the weight of one of the parts it produces and then assembles you'll need to manually reconfigure a good deal of it creating significant down time. it doesn't help that we impede the progress of automation by outsourcing labour overseas where the cost of labour makes manual processes still viable or by importing temporarily cheap labour until they realize they're getting a raw deal and move up the ladder with everyone else. if we want to develop the technology needed to alleviate the burden of manual labour then we have to disallow these temporary quick fixes. if we do nothing they'll run their course in a few decades anyways, it'll just be a slow walk to the same destination giving the people who are acting in exploitative ways ample time to stuff their coffers with the fruits of their schemes while letting the rest of society rot on the vine mere steps away from the solution that would benefit everyone.
082349872349872 2y ago
> In principle, membership in these three groups [proles, outer party, inner party] is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. —EG Sounds like Winston Smith wound up in the Outer Party due to poor A level results?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ThrowawayR2 2y ago
> "Similar to our present age where the well off can afford to allocate resources for their preschoolers that the less well off simply don't have." A talking point endlessly repeated by those trying to push an agenda but those of us who climbed the ranks from poverty because the children of the well off chose not take advantage of the privilege they had and instead chose to be indolent would beg to differ. Meritocracy is alive and well, thank you very much.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  This effect would be much smaller if there were a high-quality, free-at-point-of-service state education system. When you have to privately school or tutor or homeschool children to get them to learn things like reading [1], having extra resources at your disposal is a much bigger lever. [1] https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
jajko 2y ago
Its a bit tiring to read similar utopistic comments so often here. Completely unhinged in reality, utterly ignoring human nature, disregarding whole human history and so on. No solution to anything in sight, just complains about unfairness. I know its an easy position in life, but its a lazy one. But what about some concrete, achievable realistic steps to improve current situation even further? Or even better, what about bringing less fortunate parts of the world at least to this, apparently still miserable level? Now that would be an interesting discussion.
- keybored 2y ago
  > Completely unhinged in reality, utterly ignoring human nature, disregarding whole human history and so on. Unhinged from any concrete counter-critique, latching on to nebulous nonsense like “human nature”, hand-waves towards “whole human history” as if that means anything. That’s your comment.
labcomputer 2y ago
> preparation for the imperial exams began at the age of 3-4, the practical effect being that the well off were already advantaged. This reminds me of the recent experiments with dropping standardized tests (or making them optional) for college admissions. The critics bemoaned the advantage that rich kids had when studying for the exams... but when colleges temporarily switched to essay writing, grades and extracurriculars as the bar for admission, the incoming class was even more heavily skewed to rich kids. It turns out that rich kids have much less of an advantage on standardized exams than any other form of evaluation. The standardized test, scored by an anonymous grader, still requires you to know some things and to engage your brain. Being born to rich parents (or members of the imperial court) doesn't automatically give you passing scores... You still have to work for them.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Most of the people who wanted standardized testing done away with knew exactly what was going to happen. They knew that asian immigrant families in particular did well on standardized testing and hoped to keep them down by shifting the focus of admissions to BS like sports and after school club participation. It wasn't an accident, it was the intent from the start.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > The critics bemoaned the advantage that rich kids had when studying for the exams... but when colleges temporarily switched to essay writing, grades and extracurriculars as the bar for admission, the incoming class was even more heavily skewed to rich kids. Was there some mechanism to ensure/confirm that the scoring for those remaining factors didn't get changed during the process? I imagine someone judging an essay or extracurricular activities would behave differently if they thought it mattered a lot versus whether they thought it was just a tiebreaker to apply after a standardized test.
slibhb 2y ago
How much does "allocating resources for preschoolers" actually matter? My sense is not a whole lot. The West is fairly meritocratic. The attempt to deny this is catastrophizing e.g. "everything is awful and unfair." And in practice, critics of Western meritocracy have mainly had a negative effect by erroding the good things we do have.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  Certainly primary schooling has much much much larger effects than university. I'm not sure if preschools matter though.
wnc3141 2y ago
In a gold rush, those with the diamond shovels will go further. The only way to no perpetuate class is to not have access to the consumer class depend on a certain selection of jobs. The problem is the size of the middle class, not the selectivity of participating in the middle class.
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derbOac 2y ago
The fundamental problem imho is that standardized tests, which start out as well-intended, start to replace actual skills as a focus of interest. This is especially problematic when the tests are only correlated 0.1-0.4 with whatever is actually of interest. The tail starts to wag the dog. One common example of this is in policy discussions about the tests, where figures tend to only present means, with no variances or scatterplots. I remember this, for instance, from a report at Dartmouth not too long ago arguing for the use of standardized tests, where the authors only presented means, and not the huge variances around them which is really the heart of the issue. It starts to become especially problematic when people get canalized into lifetime paths based on essentially invalid measures, especially when the targets themselves are changeable. "Meritocracy" starts to become sort of a misnomer at that point. Of course, relying on anything too heavily starts to be an issue, and tests are a source of information. But when you start to overrely on anything, or rely on it to an extent that is empirically unwarranted, you start to have problems institutionally and societally.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > "Meritocracy" starts to become sort of a misnomer at that point. Even if the variance is so high that it becomes a lottery, it still looks better than any alternative people have come up with.
lordnacho 2y ago
I see it as a sort of leaky inheritance. The Duke of Westminster is going to pass Mayfair down to his kids forever, but the CEO of Google can only do so much for his kids. In all likelihood, they will be well educated but never get the top seat at this kind of corporation. If you couldn't pass down anything, eg if you had to put your kids in the same schools as everyone else and not give them any advantage, it would seem to be against our instincts as parents. Yet it also isn't good for society if we gave guarantees.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Duke of Westminster is worth like $12B, and Sundar Pichal is worth almost $1B which is much less but still generational wealth. The CEO of Google is kept in line by the founders who keep control with dual class stock options though.
kragen 2y ago
you say: > the practical effect being that the well off were already advantaged. ... In both instances a class perpetuates itself. by contrast, the article says: > You could be a farmer, and then you took the exam, you succeeded, and then you became an official. So in that sense, it’s not social mobility, it is political mobility. > Ilari Mäkelä: But there was genuine political mobility. > Yasheng Huang: Oh, absolutely. > Ilari Mäkelä: How would you convince a skeptic of that? > Yasheng Huang: Very easily. Again, going back to our earlier conversation about data, this is not something you can just use stories to illustrate. You kind of have to use statistics and data. An earlier historian, Ping-ti Ho 何炳棣 who really pioneered research on the keju showed that it was meritocratic. There are later historians who study keju, and they say, “Oh, so-and-so came from a prominent family, and he also succeeded. He got promoted.” But the problem with that is, how do you know it is the prominent family part that contributed to his mobility? Maybe he was extremely smart. > I’m not saying that the second view is necessarily wrong, but all I’m saying is that just telling that story itself is not convincing enough to make your point. In my work with Clair Yang from the University of Washington, we ran statistical tests to determine the effect of family backgrounds on exam performance. Whether or not you came from a rich family, whether or not you came from a politically prominent family, your father was a government official, your grandfather was a government official. Statistically, if that background influenced your exam score, we should be able to see it. We should be able to detect that effect in the statistical results we generate. > Indeed, because you had three rounds, in the first two rounds that were anonymized, we didn’t see any effect of family backgrounds on exam scores. That’s quite impressive — going back to the 6th century, 7th century, 9th century, and 13th centuries — that your backgrounds didn’t influence your exam scores. it sounds like you disagree with dr. huang's research conclusions, but you don't seem to be offering any argument against them, just bare contradiction

harimau777 2y ago

There was also an official exam for becoming a military officer. One part of it was manipulating an extremely heavy guan dao (which is likely where the stories of Guan Yu wielding a pole arm between 40 and 90 lbs come from). Training for the test is still around in the cultural practices of some people groups in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqnulYO5890 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqnulYO5890

lupusreal 2y ago
I have seen some pictures of PLA soldiers aiming their rifles with weights hanging off the end of the barrel. I wonder if this is a distance relative of that old practice.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > aiming their rifles with weights hanging off the end of the barrel That sounds like it has a practical explanation: Strengthening certain muscle-groups so that the soldiers won't easily tire of handling their weapon. It might be even better if the rifle had a laser on it, so that the exercise involves not just lifting the barrel but also centering it onto a target. (However shooting live-rounds could metaphorically backfire, since users would be getting trained to expect the wrong recoil.)
LarsDu88 2y ago
And the manchurian qing dynasty had a test where you had to be able to draw a 300 plus pound composite recurve bow! Which folks were still doing in the 20th century!
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  Edit I was mistaken: https://www.mandarinmansion.com/glossary/wuke-gong-wukegong https://www.mandarinmansion.com/glossary/wuke-gong-wukegong These military exam bows went up to 160 lbs. In at least one instance a 240 lbs bow was manufactured which a single elite archer was able to pull

aebtebeten 2y ago

...yes, there is that incredible mobility. You could be a farmer, and then you took the exam, you succeeded, and then you became an official. So in that sense, it’s not social mobility, it is political mobility. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_14 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa... > In the language of Vilfredo Pareto, this would probably be termed "capture of the rising elite"; in the language of present-day Marxists, this would be described as "utilization of potential leadership cadres from historically superseded classes"; in the language of practical politics, it means "cut in the smart boys from the opposition, so that they can't set up a racket of their own." –PMAL

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Stem0037 2y ago

I'm skeptical of some of the claims about technological innovation being higher during periods of fragmentation. Correlation doesn't equal causation - there could be other factors at play. Still, an intriguing hypothesis worth exploring further.

Nasrudith 2y ago
War is a well known factor for innovation, and it tends to go together with periods of fragmentation. Probably less innovation than a war against a rival external power.
- lordnacho 2y ago
  This is one of those claims that people tend to repeat without giving any evidence. Seems like there's some sort of attempt using Needham's data.
  - logicchains 2y ago
    There was a lot more innovation in Europe, particularly in military technology, in the 17th-19th centuries, due to many smaller states competing against each-other, compared to the Ottoman Empire and China. That's why Europe was able to so easily subjugate China.
    - qwytw 2y ago
      > to many smaller states competing against each-other, compared to the Ottoman Empire and China Did wars really have a positive impact on that though? I don't think the 30 years war etc. had such a positive impact, rather it probably slowed down progress by quite a bit.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  It could easily be the other way around; new technology leading to new wars as nations feel empowered by their new toys to act on their ambitions. The first world war occurred shortly after the introduction of smokeless powder and machine guns. These inventions were certainly funded by some military spending and perhaps even prompted by earlier wars, but in large part they were technologies who's time had come; precision manufacturing and chemical technology had only made these things possible shortly before they were invented. The development of "smart bombs" like the Walleye television bomb happened about as soon as they were technologically feasible; the idea for a fire-and-forget television bomb came from an engineer who was playing around with a new model of commercial TV camera. Emboldened by these new weapons, American politicians started wars which previously they might have considered too politically costly if they had to be fought using older methods. Desert Storm particularly.

est 2y ago

Contrary to popular belief, the original Keju (imperial exam) wasn't designed to select talented folks from commoners, but rather a royal ranking system to reduce the voilent political fights between noble houses during the Great DEI era of Wei-Jin-Northern-Southern states, when lots of deadly racial conflicts happenning in east asia for centuries. The's a saying "寒门出贵子", big names rise from small houses, yet it requires a house to rise from.

alephnerd 2y ago
Which Huang also points out in his book "Rise of the E.A.S.T", which this article is directly referencing. The Keju system helped minimize the risk of military intervention in politics along with the internal fights amongst power clans and families, but at the expense of innovation due to ossification. Highly recommend reading anything by Yasheng Huang or Yuhua Wang about the development of Chinese administrative capacity.
msabalau 2y ago
Yeah, the examination system may have been an elegant way for emperors to prevent consolidation of power among the gentry. But it really seems a stretch in the interview say the exam system provided political mobility to farmers. The exams required an absurd amount of dedicated study. That someone like Fan Zhongyan could overcome his privileged family falling into difficult circumstances and have the opportunity to rise to heights as the result of success in exams shows a certain amount of meritocratic mobility within elites, but that's not all the same thing as the exams being about recruiting talent from commoners.
- godelski 2y ago
  > The exams required an absurd amount of dedicated study. This is a problem in general with trying to achieve meritocracy. These merit based tests only work when all things are equal. Like you're suggesting, a noble has time to dedicate to studying while a farmer must work much harder since they cannot abandon their means of putting food on the table. I don't think this means we shouldn't try to make our societies more meritocratic, but I think a lot of people miss key points like this. The assumptions underlying the idea. Especially with survivor bias and that there will always be examples of those who overcame their disadvantages. But it's critical to understand these if we're actually to progress towards are more meritocratic society than we are now. [Side note] I do often wonder why we equate recognizing an advantage as diminishing the hard work one needs even when advantaged. Especially since our stories are the hero's journey and a critical retirement from that is meeting a wizard to get a magical power. Be it in The Matrix Neo's natural talent, Luke Skywalker being born a powerful Jedi, or King Author's sword and help from Merlin, we don't see these as tainting the struggles they overcome or diminishing their efforts. But we do when it's stories about ourselves.

decafninja 2y ago

IIRC, there was discussion comparing these exams to the leetcode hazing rituals that comprise tech interviews today.

Discordian93 2y ago
Spain has civil service exams and people can spend years after university preparing for them, full time, the official syallbi from the public service are tens of thousands of pages long. I don't think leetcode is anywhere near that arduous.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Is the knowledge practical in any way? Or largely irrelevant in the day to day? Is there a modern justification for such an onerous process? I am all for well trained professionals, but at some point people have to recognize gate keeping. Years of full time study is an impossible ask for many without external support.
  - throwaway2203 2y ago
    My friends who studied for the Pakistan Civil Service exam told me you can get questions like: When did Gen Musharraf visit India on so-and-so trip? A) Oct 10th 2004 B) Oct 8th 2004 ... (I made the answers up, but I distinctly remember the days being 2 days apart)
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Is cheating rampant? I do not understand how a “test” like this can work where any irrelevant piece of trivia is fair game.
    - tdeck 2y ago
      The Indian Railway exam has questions like this too. Here are some examples from previous years: https://prepp.in/rrb-recruitment-exam/practice-papers https://prepp.in/rrb-recruitment-exam/practice-papers > 1. In Computers, what does ALU stand for? > 5. BJP had won how many seats in the Lok Sabha election 2019? > 20. In which of the following states of India is the Moatsu festival celebrated? > 51. Who among the following was the first cricket player to win Arjun Award? > 62. Which is the shortest part of small intestine? I have heard that the only way to pass is to know someone who can give you the questions in advance.

nabla9 2y ago

Great podcast and great episode. Keiju system was a tool for the emperor, not for the ruling classes. The first two rounds were anonymized and in the highest level exam the gentry performed worse than those coming from lower ranks. The incentive for the emperor was not to allow potential competition into high offices. It was meritocratic, but it also homogenized the ideology and stifled innovation.

Apocryphon 2y ago

A previous discussion about the exams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888398

LarsDu88 2y ago

Interestingly enough, standardized testing was unknown to Europe until they made contact with China. One company that was inspired by this was the British East India company which introduced an exam for employees. This contributed to the company becoming the largest most powerful corporation in the world! Down to running private militaries and overthrowing kingdoms. At one point the company's private armies were 3x larger than the British military. As for China itself, it kept doing these exams, but the content never changed. Straight into the 20th century the scholar exam involved memorizing Confucian classics. There was even a military exam that wasn't killed until the first decade of the 20th century. It involved being able to hit multiple targets with a bow and arrow whilst riding a horse, and being able to draw a 300 lb bow without straining your shoulders.

LarsDu88 2y ago
So for all ya'll software companies... one day it might be prudent to update these leetcode problems... With quizzes about tensors, Einstein summation, and recent scientific papers
neaden 2y ago
I think there must be a conversion issue there. An English Longbow topped out at like, 110 lb draw weight I don't think you could make a 300 lb bow, and if you did I don't think anyone could draw it without straining their shoulders.
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  Here are the historical draw weights for Qing dynasty bows: https://www.manchuarchery.org/historical-draw-weights-qing-bows https://www.manchuarchery.org/historical-draw-weights-qing-b.... 80 lbs was considered minimum for military usage and 150 lbs was not unheard of Imperial examination bows were giant versions of these military bows that were intended to assess the strength of the examinee. I couldn't find reliable numbers on the draw weights for these, but needless to say they had to have significantly higher draw weights than standard military bows. Even the Qing Emperor was expected to be able to draw a 120 lb+ bow or at least had such bows in his personal collection. The Manchurians came from a culture that valued hunting and horseback archery even more than the Han Chinese.

082349872349872 2y ago

> Surprisingly, candidates from wealthy families performed worse during this round. This is counterintuitive, especially when compared to contemporary educational systems where socioeconomic background often correlates positively with educational access and performance. Our research revealed a negative correlation in imperial China. > We attribute this to the emperor’s reluctance to appoint officials from independent power bases to central government positions. The final round selected the most important officials for the imperial court - those who would design future keju examinations, advise the government, and have direct access to the emperor. This system effectively marginalized the nobility and successful merchants. This is a pretty brilliant mechanism: an emperor normally draws a certain amount of jealousy and hate from the nobility and successful merchants, but by promoting rustic wonks over them via this system, might the emperor have been playing "let's you and him fight": diverting their animosity onto a bunch of "academic, gate-keeping, elites"?