【2020-12-06】
@whigzhou: 科举考试可能是整个帝国防腐设计最下功夫的制度了吧,许多细节安排在别处都是看不到的,也就难怪它会成为闱姓赌博的对象。
而且这些措施的成本很高,可以说不惜血本,比如每次乡试考官都是从京城派出(接到任命后五天内必须离京),风尘仆仆几个月,掐着时间在开考前几天赶到(到太早了怕有人上门),然后,为了完成封闭式阅卷,考官及其助手仆役几百号人被禁闭在贡院里整整一个多月,考卷还要让一大批抄工誊抄两份。
(more...)
【2020-12-06】
@whigzhou: 科举考试可能是整个帝国防腐设计最下功夫的制度了吧,许多细节安排在别处都是看不到的,也就难怪它会成为闱姓赌博的对象。
而且这些措施的成本很高,可以说不惜血本,比如每次乡试考官都是从京城派出(接到任命后五天内必须离京),风尘仆仆几个月,掐着时间在开考前几天赶到(到太早了怕有人上门),然后,为了完成封闭式阅卷,考官及其助手仆役几百号人被禁闭在贡院里整整一个多月,考卷还要让一大批抄工誊抄两份。
(more...)
封侯拜爵的神仙们
辉格
2016年12月11日
中国民间信仰以其神仙繁多而著称,宋代仅湖州一地的寺观祠庙里供奉的神祗,有史料可查者即有92个,扣除名号重复者,还有50多个,粗略估算,全国各地的神祗数量大约介于乡镇数和村庄数之间,看来古代中国人『积极造神,见神即拜』的名声并非虚浪。
如此多神仙得到敬拜,还要归功于神仙来源的多样化,和大众在神仙制造方式上的创造性;早期神祗来源大致和其他文化相仿,比如司掌某种自然力的自然神,或者被认定为某一族群共同祖先的始祖神,然而自中古以降,一种新型神祗开始大量涌现。
这些新神都是不久前还生活于人世的真实人物,因某种显赫成就或奇特经历而被认为拥有神力;认定神力的入门标准很低——担任过高官,参加过某次战役,遭受过冤屈,或者离奇死亡——总之,任何在大众眼里有点特别的地方(more...)
【2016-08-21】
@whigzhou: 两宋之间温州一定发生了点什么……浙东学派,绍兴师爷,宁波帮商人,似乎都能从这张表里看出点苗头。
@whigzhou: 这还是对各路解额施加了限制之后的情况,否则数字会更夸张。
@南洋首富: 二件事:1、永嘉学派大兴办学打下的基础。2、乾道二年特大水灾温州人死了一大半,空地吸引莆田泉州仙游移民,而闽南人热衷科举。永嘉学派的办学普及加上闽南移民带来的热衷科举文化,使温州进士大增。
< (more...)Imperial exams and human capital
科举考试与人力资本
作者:Stephen Hsu @ 2015-5-20
译者:Luis Rightcon(@Rightcon)
校对:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy)
来源:Information Processing,http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/05/imperial-exams-and-human-capital.html
The dangers of rent seeking and the educational signaling trap. Although the imperial examinations were probably g loaded (and hence supplied the bureaucracy with talented administrators for hundreds of years), it would have been better to examine candidates on useful knowledge, which every participant would then acquire to some degree.
寻租的危险和教育信号陷阱。尽管科举考试基于一般智力因素(因此几百年来为官僚机构输送了很多优秀的行政人员)【校注:G因素,或一般智力因素,心理学上指人类一切认知活动都依赖的智力因素】,但如果它考察的是候选者的实用知识,那会更好,这样每个候选者都可以对这种知识有所掌握。
See also Les Grandes Ecoles Chinoises and History Repeats.
另请参考我的博文:“中国大学”和“历史在重复”
(more...)Farewell to Confucianism: The Modernizing Effect of Dismantling China’s Imperial Examination System Ying Bai The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 这里是香港科技大学Ying Bai的论文“告别儒家:中国废除科举制度的现代化影响” Imperial China employed a civil examination system to select scholar bureaucrats as ruling elites. This institution dissuaded high-performing individuals from pursuing some modernization activities, such as establishing modern firms or studying overseas. This study uses prefecture-level panel data from 1896-1910 to compare the effects of the chance of passing the civil examination on modernization before and after the abolition of the examination system. 中华帝国采用科举考试制度筛选士大夫来作为统治精英。这一机制阻止了优秀的个人从事一些现代化的活动,如建立现代企业或者去海外学习。本研究使用了从1896年到1910年废科举前后的府级名册数据,来考察科举晋身机会对现代化的影响。 Its findings show that prefectures with higher quotas of successful candidates tended to establish more modern firms and send more students to Japan once the examination system was abolished. As higher quotas were assigned to prefectures that had an agricultural tax in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1643) of more than 150,000 stones, I adopt a regression discontinuity design to generate an instrument to resolve the potential endogeneity, and find that the results remain robust. 研究结果表明,废科举之后,那些科举取士配额较多的府建立的现代企业更多,向日本派遣的留学生也更多。由于那些在明朝时期(1368-1643)缴纳农业税超过15万石的府拥有的取士配额更多,我采用断点回归方法生成了一种工具,以解决潜在的内生相关性问题,发现结果依然稳固。【校注:此为论文“摘要”】From the paper: 论文内容摘录:
Rent seeking is costly to economic growth if “the ablest young people become rent seekers [rather] than producers” (Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny 1991: 529). Theoretical studies suggest that if a society specifies a higher payoff for rent seeking rather than productive activities, more talent would be allocated in unproductive directions (Acemoglu 1995; Baumol 1990; Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny 1991, 1993). 对于经济增长来说,寻租行为代价非常昂贵——如果“最优秀的年轻人倾向于成为寻租者,而不是生产者” (Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny 1991: 529) 的话。理论研究表明,如果社会让寻租行为比生产行为获利更多的话,更多有才能的人将会被分配到不事生产的方向(Acemoglu 1995; Baumol 1990; Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny 1991, 1993)。 This was the case in late Imperial China, when a large part of the ruling class – scholar bureaucrats – was selected on the basis of the imperial civil examination. The Chinese elites were provided with great incentives to invest in a traditional education and take the civil examination, and hence few incentives to study other “useful knowledge” (Kuznets 1965), such as Western science and technology.2 Thus the civil examination constituted an institutional obstacle to the rise of modern science and industry (Baumol 1990; Clark and Feenstra 2003; Huff 2003; Lin 1995). 这就是中华帝国晚期的情况,统治阶级的很大一部分——即士大夫们——以科举考试的形式选拔出来。中国的精英们具有极大的激励来投资于传统教育,并且参加科举考试,因此对于其他“实用知识”就不那么热情了(Kuznets 1965),比如说西方科学技术。这样,科举考试就构成了现代科学技术发展的制度性障碍(Baumol 1990; Clark and Feenstra 2003; Huff 2003; Lin 1995)。 This paper identifies the negative incentive effect of the civil exam on modernization by exploring the impact of the system’s abolition in 1904-05. The main empirical difficulty is that the abolition was universal, with no regional variation in policy implementation. To better understand the modernizing effect of the system’s abolition, I employ a simple conceptual framework that incorporates two choices open to Chinese elites: to learn from the West and pursue some modernization activities or to invest in preparing for the civil examination. 本文通过探索1904-1905年间废除科举考试的影响,来鉴别科举考试对于现代化的负面激励效应。主要的实证困难在于这一废除举动是全国性的,没有政策实施上的地区差异。为了更好地理解废除科举体制对于现代化建设的影响,我采用了一个简单的概念框架,其中包括了中国精英们在当时的两个选项:向西方学习并实行一些现代化举动,或是为准备科举考试而增加投入。 In this model, the elites with a greater chance of passing the examination would be less likely to learn from the West; they would tend to pursue more modernization activities after its abolition. Accordingly, the regions with a higher chance of passing the exam should be those with a larger increase in modernization activities after the abolition, which makes it possible to employ a difference-in-differences (DID) method to identify the causal effect of abolishing the civil examination on modernization. 在这个模型中,那些更有可能通过科举考试的精英们将不太可能向西方学习;而废除科举后他们将倾向于更多进行现代化活动。于是,科举晋身机会更大的地区应当也是那些废除科举之后现代化活动更为活跃的地区,这就使得我可以采用双重差分(DID)方法来鉴别废除科举制对于现代化的因果效应。 I exploit the variation in the probability of passing the examination among prefectures – an administrative level between the provincial and county levels. To control the regional composition of successful candidates, the central government of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) allocated a quota of successful candidates to each prefecture. In terms of the chances of individual participants – measured by the ratio of quotas to population – there were great inequalities among the regions (Chang 1955). 我利用了不同府在科举通过率上的差异——“府”这一地方的管理层级介于省级和县级之间。为了控制中选者的地域构成,清王朝(1644-1911)把取士名额分配到府。以个人投考者的成功率衡量——以配额占总人口比率计——不同地区很不平均(Chang 1955)。 To measure the level of modernization activities in a region, I employ (1) the number of newly modern private firms (per million inhabitants) above a designated size that has equipping steam engine or electricity as a proxy for the adoption of Western technology and (2) the number of new Chinese students in Japan – the most import host country of Chinese overseas students (per million inhabitants) as a proxy of learning Western science. Though the two measures might capture other things, for instance entrepreneurship or human capital accumulation, the two activities are both intense in modern science and technology, and thus employed as the proxies of modernization. ... 为衡量某个地区的现代化活动水平,我采用了(1)新成立的、具有一定规模、并应用了蒸汽机或者电力的现代私企数量(每百万居民),来代表对于西方科技的应用情况;以及(2)(每百万居民中)新近去往日本的中国留学生数量(日本是中国海外留学生的最主要目的地),来代表对于西方科学的学习情况。虽然这两者可能都会捕捉到其他东西,比如企业家或者人力资本积累,但这两个活动在现代科学技术中都是非常剧烈的,所以可用于代表现代化进程……From Credentialism and elite employment: 以下摘自我之前的博文“文凭主义与精英雇佣”:
Evaluators relied so intensely on “school” as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms – in fact, evaluators tended to believe that elite and, in particular, super-elite instruction was “too abstract,” “overly theoretical,” or even “useless” compared to the more “practical” and “relevant” training offered at “lesser” institutions – but rather due to the strong cultural meanings and character judgments evaluators attributed to admission and enrollment at an elite school. I discuss the meanings evaluators attributed to educational prestige in their order of prevalence among respondents. ... 评价者们过于依赖于把“学校”作为评估的标准,这不是因为他们相信精英教育的内容可以使学生更善于应对公司生活——事实上,评价者倾向于相信,与“更差”的机构所提供的更“实用”和“更有意义”的训练相比,精英教育、特别是超级精英教育“太抽象”、“过于理论化”、甚或是“根本没用”——而是因为评价者给精英学校的招生录取赋予了丰厚的文化内涵和个性判断。我将按照它们各自在受访者中的流行程度次序,来讨论评价者在教育声望上所赋予的意义……(编辑:辉格@whigzhou) *注:本译文未经原作者授权,本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利,如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容,请私信联系,我们会立即作出响应。
——海德沙龙·翻译组,致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——
高考折射出的身份焦虑
辉格
2012年6月12日
每年高考,家长好像都比孩子更紧张,而且表现的一年比一年夸张,拥挤在大门口守候已是稀松平常,为调整状态提前一两个月到宾馆开“备考房”,全家出动当保镖护卫孩子赴考场,迟到了跪求门卫,甚至对附近马路实施“交通管制”,“我们家孩子今天高考”俨然已成为要求邻居和市民给予特权待遇的响亮理由。
有人说,家长对高考如此紧张,是因为中国的社会上升通道狭窄,且多半已被特权阶层垄断,留给普通大众的进身之阶只有高考这座独木桥了,而且,诸多个人发展机会中,唯有高考算是机会较均等(more...)
古代集权政府的各大功能系统中,最具可控性、执行最不走样的,就是科举系统了,所以,对皇帝来说,重要的是如何让自己从该项宝贵资源中获取的收益最大化,看来,将其用于在自己和精英层之间建立恩荫/效忠关系,使之成为精英的主要社会爬升通道,比用它来培训选拔公务员,要合算的多。
所以,尽管绍兴师爷培训体系已证明了其训练选拔公务员的效率,证明了整理和教授实用行政知识和技能的可行性,但它非但不可能被系统接受或借鉴,反而会受到排斥和贬低。
假如科举制变成一个面向实用知识的公务员培(more...)