Nicola Jones in Knowable Magazine:
What is the history of bureaucracies? Where did the concept originate, and how has it evolved?
It’s always been true that ideas and policies don’t execute themselves. You need a bureaucracy, a group of servants, to do that for you. That is true for nation states, and also for companies and universities.
The major leap in the evolution of bureaucracy, to a place that is not corrupt, happens when the people appointed to it aren’t friends or family or political cronies who can pay for their position, but people who are selected for their expertise, meritocratically. If you go back more than a thousand years, China is one of the first places where we see the development of a really important bureaucracy with entrance exams. It was very serious if you were caught cheating — the punishment could be death. We know from ample literature that corruption is lower where you have meritocratically recruited civil servants.
More here.
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