I am pro-commerce for many reasons one of which is listed in the title of this blog. Commerce supports "meritocracy".
In commerce meritocracy means hiring the most competent person for the job or using the most competent supplier.
The antithesis of meritocracy is usually nepotism. Nepotism is the hiring practice used in most pre-commercial societies and is still used in many areas such as small retail business. It is still used in giant companies in China.
A friend of mine, one of the few people I actually can talk with about abstract matters, Stephen Besselman, and I were talking about the backwardness of the Arab society. Nepotism is rampant in the Arab world. You will always find one of the sons as the successor to a leader in any era and in every Arab country.
The problem with this is that offspring seldom inherit the skills or talents of the powerful parent. The same is true for the education of the offspring. It is seldom effective in transmitting skills or talents.
Stephen pointed out that one of the benefits of having a harem and a very large number of offspring in an Arab or similar society that uses harems is that so many offspring increases the chance of finding a competent son
We now have a conceptual alternative to the horrors of nepotism. It is to support large harems as a way of finding skilled successor children.
This is the second alternative to meritocracy that I have found. The first of course was the Japanese model in which a highly competent stranger is adopted into powerful families to take on responsibilities as the official child.
Thank you Stephen