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To be fair, meritocracy as we know it is very recent, and absolutely deserves to be called an "ocracy". Or perhaps an "ism"?
Until very recently in the US and UK, pretty much all lucrative and/or important jobs were distributed through a system of patronage. If you read about the late 1800s it's clear that the move from "this person supports me and should be rewarded" to "important jobs should be obtained by passing a set of exams (or proving your worth in other ways) regardless of the recipient's allegiance" was an explicitly political movement. In the UK you had civil service reform after the Trevelyan report; in the US you had the Civil Service Reform Act.
In the US at least, this movement was strongly opposed by supports of the spoils system, partly for the obvious reason, partly because it removed the ability of governments to ensure that lower levels of the bureaucracy were in line with their leaders. Given the fact that it has become totally impossible for right-wing movements to govern because of an entrenched and hostile bureaucratic class, I think they had a point.
You also have complementary movements in the 1900s campaigning against choosing people to do jobs based on family ties (nepotism), ethnic group (racism), class, religion, etc.
In short, what we now think of as meritocracy is not the natural state of affairs but the result of a strong government forcing people to hire in ways that lawmakers think is optimal. Which is what you’re saying I suppose but I don’t think Freddie is misunderstanding anything. He believes that the long-term benefit argument is mostly made by self-serving high-iq people and wants to see money allocated in a different way.
Which I oppose, though I’d be a happy man if more right wingers could get it drummed through their head that personnel is policy.
Given that you cite the Northcote-Trevelyan report, how would your analysis of meritocracy take shape if we stretched it to China? China's had some sort of meritocracy (for a particular sort of merit) for at least a thousand years at this point, at least for official posts.
I have a giant hole in my understanding of the world where an understanding of Chinese history ought to be. Any recommendations?
I have the vague impression that it led to a stable but fairly stagnant society. It also seems potentially relevant that bureaucrats were a mid-level class and usually ruled over by warlords, who presumably had little patience with excuses.
I can’t read Dutch, but I‘m sure @Nantafiria’s recommendation is superb.
For my own…sorry, I’ve been meaning to type a response out for a couple days now, but I‘ve had long shifts recently. I can quote a previous post of mine on the same matter.
Are there any particular questions you‘d like to ask? I’m happy to answer to the best of my ability.
Onto the topics on discussion.
Regarding stagnancy — I would caution against the idea that China was a stagnant and stable society, as @Nantafiria does as well. The history of China is punctuated by periods of terrible internecine and interstate warfare as well as many, many rebellions e.g. the Taiping Rebellion that is contemporaneous with the American Civil War. China is also home to many social revolutions; the first print culture in the world started in the Tang dynasty (618-907), for example; while the Song dynasty (960-1279) embarked in an economic revolution that is often eeriely similar to early modern European growth (and produced a massive quantity of e.g. steel that wouldn’t be exceeded until centuries later in Europe), and which resulted in a large, rich mercantile class. (This would unfortunately be undone by the following Yuan (Mongol) and Ming dynasties.)
I would however not try to oversell the instability of China. Although it is undeniable that the Chinese heartland is astonishingly fertile ground, along with great natural barriers acting as physical borders (and comparatively weaker states and less numerous peoples in Southeast Asia coming by sea, especially after the colonization and consolidation of southern China under imperial control), China is probably the closest thing the world has to a civilisation-state, whatever that means, and I think this at least is partly due to an enduring social and political culture.
Regarding the status of mandarins.
Confucian bureaucrats in China, especially towards from mid-Imperial times onwards, had great power and prestige, would fill the most important and most powerful roles in the empire’s bureaucracy, and certainly were not a mid-level class in comparison to military men. In fact, towards the end of Imperial China, it would often be bureaucrats who were spearheading military operations (e.g. Li Hongzhang/Hung-Chang lead troops against the Taiping, and the Huai army and Beiyang fleet that lost the first Sino-Japanese war were under his command), and bureaucrats were often well-read and educated on military matters.
There were also military versions of the imperial examinations, but the civil service exams were unquestionably more prestigious.
Regarding the civil service examinations.
There are early traditions of evaluation-based examination systems and tests of skill in China’s predynastic and early dynastic history, including small-scale bureaucratic exams in the Han dynasty; but the first systematic establishment of a large-scale, recurring examination system that was de jure open to all (well, not quite, but significantly more than purely aristocracy) occurs during the Tang dynasty (perhaps more accurately during the Southern Zhou dynasty, in Wu Zetian’s reign).
Initially there were different examinations for different specialities (e.g. legal scholars and mathematicians would take different exams), but over time this homogenized into one route. Also, while there is something of a meme about how the imperial examinations had an overwhelming emphasis on the Confucian classics and thus did not prepare the mandarins properly, there were in fact sections of the exam requiring analysis or critical responses regarding current affairs or governmental policy.
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Would a spoils system have really worked better? With the increased centralization and polarization it would have resulted in a collective whiplash every four or eight years. Right now the deep state/civil service functions as a dampener, same would say a biased one, but a dampener none the less.
I take your point but a biased damper isn’t a damper, it’s a valve. Or a filter, if you want to put it that way. Cthulhu swims left, he doesn’t bob back and forth.
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Massive, sustained, nation-wide riots, incited by a deliberate misinformation campaign. A pandemic that has killed seven million people and was quite possibly man-made, used to gut civil liberties and abruptly modify the electoral process by the tribe that likely created it. Unprecedented speech restrictions being coordinated by the government to suppress dissent. Direct, repeated interference in the mechanisms of democracy by the security services, uniformly benefiting one party. Cratering trust in all civil institutions. The progressive collapse of every conflict resolution mechanism our society posesses. Visceral civil hatred on a level not seen in a hundred years.
Gasoline is not a "damper".
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The spoils system has the advantage of preventing a class of professional rulers from becoming completely entrenched. As it stands, the deep state has become powerful enough that not even an election can meaningfully change the direction simply because it only changes the publicly known (and increasingly ineffective) parts of the government. If we had a spoils system, at least there’d be a bit of accountability for those in agencies who make terrible decisions that hold back progress, or behave in tyrannical ways. This is something that I think Moldbug is absolutely right about — the people making decisions real decisions — are never held to account for their failures. And as such, they don’t care how bad their decisions are.
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The existence of said whiplash likely would have prevented the centralization. Less reason to invest in growing the power of the central authority of your opponent actually gets to use the power once in awhile.
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