Spinning up a new thread for https://palladiummag.com/2020/07/10/how-late-zhou-china-reverse-engineered-a-civilization since the previous one got side-tracked. It's really great!

That was a good read, thanks for sharing! And it shows the value of studying the history of other times and civilizations: it is much easier to remain an objective observer from a distance. Imagine if the authors had chosen Facebook to illustrate the importance of social institutions: the story would have been horrifying.

Too bad the article is made up. The level of Chinese writing in this time period was bone oracle stuff. How on earth are they making conclusions about what the people thought in Zhou dynasty when there are no written records? Chinese block printing was the big invention that made things change in the Tang dynasty, 600-900 AD. That's almost 1000 years later. I have no doubt that in China's incredibly long history that numerous rulers didn't try to fix up corruption and inefficiency, but we have scant evidence of these older periods. We don't have surviving commentaries, mostly thanks to the Gang of Four who sent out teenagers with machine guns to erase all prior chinese history during the Cultural Revolution. I was studying Chinese at the time, and my father was going to send me to the University of Beijing. It was a very dark time for China. Taiwan has most of the old stuff, which was saved from destruction by the retreating armies of Chiang Kai Shek. The only ancient civilization that has any good number of surviving written records is mesopotamia, because they wrote on clay tablets of which we still have around a million. There are people who can read those tablets as casually as a newspaper. There were ancient civilizations in other places, but we have to guess from pottery shards and their trash heaps to figure out what they were up to. Not very direct information. The #1 factor causing societal collapse is cheating. Archeology is the study of the collapse of civilizations, and it is a shame that the Archeologists which know full well what causes collapse only talk to each other in academic conferences and journals.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project can you expand more on what you mean by cheating?

My sister Celia spent 8 years preparing for her PhD in Archaelogy, studying Mesopotamia 6000 - 3000 BC. She was very fond of Hammurabi, who was a very upstanding guy. He did one or two debt foregivnesses, to stave off collapse of the government, because back then when you owed money you or a family member became a time-limited indentured servant, and during that time you aren't earning any taxable income. If enough people (like over 50%) get into that state and don't feed the govt, it collapses. Anyway there are many parallels with today, and we are indeed flirting with collapse. Hammurabi's code, is incredibly strict, and is all about paying people proper wages, setting interest rates, personal injury liability, etc. But another kind of cheating is the concentration of political power into ruling families. My sister had studied the marriage records, and found out that the high officials were stuffing their relatives into cushy govt positions (nepotism). Anyway whether its crony capitalism, medical malpractice, debasement of the currency, there is nothing new under the sun, and Babylon in the year 3000 had the same problems we have today. It was a 3 level society, with artistocrats, plebeians, and slaves. "200. If a man knocks out a tooth of a man of his own rank, they shall knock out his tooth  201. If he knocks out a tooth of a plebeian, he shall pay one-third mina of silver"