Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, they were less watertight as compared with the Chinese system. They were probably less well-organized than the Chinese system. In Japan, they also had a version of the civil service examination system, but they didn’t really continue the system beyond the 12th century, 13th century. Essentially, in the 19th century, when Japan embarked upon modernization, it was a Japan similar to China at the very beginning stage of the civil service examination system, rather than toward the end of the civil service examination system, when the exam system was extremely watertight, was extremely homogeneous, was extremely well organized. Japan evolved into a modern society with a looser system of the Chinese system, as compared with China in the 19th century, which responded to the challenges from the West from a very, very rigid system that China began to consolidate around the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty. If I think of China, economically speaking, in the 17th century, it still seems broadly on a par with Western Europe, and by the 19th century, that has changed. Is it that the civil service exam system in China became more negative, more dangerous? Or is it simply Europe raced ahead and China stayed put? 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.…

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