Spinner on board!!! :)

Its refreshing to know that despite the scarcity of women in China, Chinese men, like their western counterparts are also shallow creatures who grade a woman's attractiveness base on the number of eyelids she has.

Clark's story tracks well to some manner of pseudo-Foucaultian narrative which locates modernity in the development of powerful micro-technologies for disciplining individuals. The systemic enforcement of norms which favor rational+orderly labor and long-term time preferences could only be enabled, in this account, by the development of an efficient and decentralized apparatus for regulating deviations from that norm.  
 
In other words, institutions do matter, but you have to be careful about which institutions you focus on--the rule of law et. al. only matters if you have the mechanisms in place for consistent and efficient compulsion.