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” 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——