I take it for granted that most people will understand that meritocracy is a paramount good for a commercial society.
I know that because I have worked with many Arabs and Arab groups where a cousin is hired because he is a cousin and not for any special needed skills. The same with Filipinos. For Chinese it is a member of the same name clan. For Africans it is the tribe. For Spanish speakers it is 'family members' which is just as broad as 'cousins' for other ethnicities.
This nepotism creates internal incompetence in organizations and makes it hard to make corrections or to fire people. Objective evaluations of work and output simply don't exist.
To really understand the social problem I looked at the great historian of the West, Francis Parkman. I argue that opening the West in America allowed the younger children of the hereditary elite to escape their families and become creative and productive. The West became a fertile ground for meritocracy and commercial vitality. It still is.
Parkman saw this in his 1874 books. Here is his genius speaking:
"The American future looked more promising than the Canadian because in the one the experience of freedom encouraged energies in ordinary people that centralized paternalistic absolutism in the other killed in the cradle. In his fourth volume, The Old Régime in Canada (1874; revised 1893), Parkman explains why the English colonial power flourished while the French withered:
Perpetual intervention of government, —regulations, restrictions, encouragements sometimes more mischievous than restrictions, a constant uncertainty what the authorities would do next, the fate of each man resting less with himself than with another, volition enfeebled, self-reliance paralyzed, —the condition, in short, of a child held always under the rule of a father, in the main well-meaning and kind, sometimes generous, sometimes neglectful, often capricious, and rarely very wise, —such were the influences under which Canada grew up. If she had prospered, it would have been sheer miracle. A man, to be a man, must feel that he holds his fate, in some good measure, in his own hands.
Had the Canadians been given freedom they would not have known what to do with it. “Freedom is for those who are fit for it; the rest will lose it, or turn it to corruption. Church and State were right in exercising authority over a people which had not learned the first rudiments of self-government.” The success of the English colonies and the failure of the French had their origins in deep-rooted political traditions that respectively enhanced and inhibited intellectual and moral independence. “The cause lies chiefly in the vast advantage drawn by England from the historical training of her people in habits of reflection, forecast, industry, and self-reliance, —a training which enabled them to adopt and maintain an invigorating system of self-rule, totally inapplicable to their rivals.”
That seems great insight to me, especially by the historian of the American West.
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