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:
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.
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.
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 Chinese administrative capacity.
IIRC, there was discussion comparing these exams to the leetcode hazing rituals that comprise tech interviews today.
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.
...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#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of present-day Marxists, this would be described as "utilization of potential leadership cadres from historically superseded classes"; in the language of practical politics, it means "cut in the smart boys from the opposition, so that they can't set up a racket of their own."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
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.
I suspect that the motivating factor is lack of deployable human capital. In a large centralized society, there may always people to deploy at the problem. The more people you deploy at the problem, the more time the people at the top spend thinking about people issues and the bureaucracy that comes with that. The bottleneck usually happens when the people at the top become so focused on bureaucracy/politics/corruption that nothing really gets done.
Fragmented societies are less prone to bureaucracy, and more prone to not having enough people available to solve a problem. These factors absolutely help innovation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?