Swots.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 02:35:58 GMT

Bob Stancliff:
> These days you only need a high school diploma and proof of some typing
> skill and you can be an entry level bureaucrat. While they must have had
> plenty of brown-nosing in ancient China to be offered a promotion, the
> Chinese made their promotion qualification tests difficult so that you
> could prove you deserved it. That is the meritocracy reference. Even if
> the tests were not strictly applied, it still beats the current system of
> 'resume embellishing'.

ObGlorantha: the obvious parallel here is of course, rather than the Lunar Empire, the KraLor one, where the bureaucracy is explicitly meritocratic. (Though as has been noted, it's not an 'equality of outcome' sort of meritocracy, not by a _long_ chalk. You have to take an exam to get any mandarin's or exarch's post: the degree to which this is subverted by the Precision Back-Hand Bung, or shameless nepotism, or the brain-flogging use of the 'crammer' is somewhat 'user-configuirable', as an RPG plot device.)

The Lunar system, whether more or less egalitarain in practice, I perceive as being much more ad hoc in conception: Buseri and other flunkies are Appointed, but some or other more senior apparatchik, on whatever personal whim he's move dby, or procedure he's compelled to use in practice. They're not examined or elected, rather they 'emerge'.

Cheers,
Alex.

---