Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think there are debates about whether, in the 17th century, China was really on a par with Europe. There was a famous California school that made that point. Their argument was, it is not right to compare the whole of China with Europe. You need to compare the most developed part of China with Europe. If you do that, the level of economic development was comparable with each other. I think there’s some recent research that challenges that view, using better data, more fine-grained data that shows that per capita GDP by the 17th century in China was much lower than per capita GDP in Europe, even among the most developed regions of China. Our own data do not support the view that China in the 17th century was comparable to Europe. We don’t use economic data; we use inventions data. By the 17th century, China was already not very inventive as compared with the 6th century. The level of inventions declined dramatically in the 17th century, so I tend to lean toward the view that by the 17th century, China was already quite backward. If I think of the Chinese exam system today — not just for civil service, but more generally — it seems fairly meritocratic to me. I often meet smart Chinese graduate students. I ask, “Where are you from?” The answer is not, “I’m from a wealthy family in Shanghai.” They’re from some part of China I’ve never heard of. Am I wrong to think that it’s currently quite meritocratic? No, you’re not wrong at all. It is one of my central points in the book, that the power of the Chinese civil service examination system was, in a very narrow sense, very meritocratic, very well proctored. There was public corruption, but the corruption was not endemic. There were guard rails making sure that the integrity of the exam was at a level sufficient to attract the interest and the participation from the masses of the people. We showed that family background — and this is from the data from the Ming Dynasty, 14th century, 15th century — the family backgrounds didn’t affect the performance of the candidates who took the exam, which is quite remarkable. If you think about SAT today, even today there’s some correlation between exam performance and the backgrounds of the people who take the exam. The Chinese had a very well-developed system to make sure that the economics didn’t affect the performance through a subsidy program, through a very well-administered protocol of the civil service examination system. Anonymization — China invented a double anonymization system. The examiner didn’t know who the examinee was; the examinee didn’t know who the examiner was. It was a very sophisticated system. They also hired scribes to copy the exam papers to make sure that the handwriting did not provide any information about the identity of the candidates. From that tradition, China now has a college examination system which is very, very tough, which is very, very strict. One of the justifications for having that system is that because China is so corrupt, this is one of the few areas where corruption has not affected the outcome, and therefore, we should keep the system. When you make the argument that maybe we should change the examination system to allow more creative thinking, less emphasis on memorization, the pushback has always been, “Look at the country. It’s so corrupt. Corruption is so pervasive. This is one area that is not corrupt. Let’s not destroy that isolated area of cleanliness and capabilities.” So, I have no problem with what you have just said, which is that the Chinese exam system is very meritocratic.…

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