Slightly unrelated, but James Burke explains this really well in Connections[1] S01E03.
Basically he says one of the reasons China didn't experience the rapid growth Europe went through during the Renaissance was because Chinese society during those times had a strict hierarchy. You weren't allowed to rise through the ranks with your inventions or technologies, no matter how revolutionary they were. "No incentive, no change."
It certainly was, and initially did improve his reputation.
If you look at what happened he could have benefited hugely if he was not obnoxious and had not gone out of his was to annoy people. He mocked the powerful, and he insisted that the Copernican cosmology (the sun is the centre of the universe) was not just a theory, but had been proven true.
I've been using Firefly iii for about 3 years now. I use it with Waterfly iii [1] so anytime I get an SMS or notification from my bank about any kind of transaction, Waterfly automatically parses text from the notification and auto-fills transaction details like the amount, transaction title and date.
Makes it super easy to maintain proper history since you can instantly create transactions from your phone.
Basically he says one of the reasons China didn't experience the rapid growth Europe went through during the Renaissance was because Chinese society during those times had a strict hierarchy. You weren't allowed to rise through the ranks with your inventions or technologies, no matter how revolutionary they were. "No incentive, no change."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...