A miniature landscape palace of Xi 'an Daming Palace National Heritage Park is seen under heavy snow in Xi 'an City, Shaanxi Province, China, Nov 11, 2023.
- Obtaining high status was likely as easy for men in the Tang Dynasty as for men in the modern US, a study suggests.
- It found that social mobility for men at the time could be compared to that of the 1960s in the US.
- These men weren't aristocrats, but became bureaucrats through the rigorous imperial examination.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed education, family status, and ranks of officials in the Tang Dynasty, and found that social mobility at the time was comparable to standards in the 1960s and 1970s in the US.
The research team, led by Michael Hout, a professor of sociology at New York University, combed through thousands of epitaphs describing the lives of these officials, who lived in the 7th to 10th century.
These were men who had essentially made it in life, Hout told Business Insider.
Comment: The Western world is in rapid decline and having gone away from a system of meritocracy has had a lot to with it. China and many other countries outside the Western 'garden' are sticking to a system which chooses the most qualified people for a job rather than the color of their skin, their sex or sexual orientation, their ethnicity or their wokeness.
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