I don't think a meritocracy requires the formal education system we have. I'm sure the top trades people in ancient times were high in society.

Also I don't think we have the meritocracy people claim we have. Being born into a well connected wealthy family is such a huge head start. And some of the people at the top seem to have little merit, for example the kardashians seem to be famous because they're famous. Not to pick on them but they are a public example of how money gets money.

Unfortunately not. The reason meritocracy has “won” over the last 200 years is those societies that didn’t embrace it lost the wars that were fought.

This is so completely wrong. Wars are won and lost for many, many reasons. Food, resources, location, coincidence, weather, politics, sheer luck.

This is the sort of crap people complain about whenever the meritocracy comes up. Sorry, but merit is not whatever you want it to be after the fact when you point to something that succeeded. That's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Yes wars have been won and lost for many reasons over history, but since the development of meritocracy (last 200 years) those societies that have embraced it have won all the important wars.

Do you really think the nobility just rolled over and gave the middle classes all the power because they asked nicely?

Edit. Actually that is exactly what merit is. Meritocracy is not rule by the just, but rule by those most likely to be winners. It just happens that given the opportunity the “winners" are most likely to be found within then middle class.

Can you give examples of societies that have embraced meritocracy? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Singapore was explicitly created as a meritocracy, when it was granted independence from Malaysia by England. This was a deliberate contrast to Malaysia, where the government did and still does explicitly promote policies that benefit the Malay minority at the expense of the more economically successful Chinese minority. Singapore is now one of the most prosperous countries in the world.

Fun fact: the first president of Singapore was senior wrangler at Cambridge, which according to Wikipedia has been described as the "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain"[1].

Singapore also has one of the world's most liberal immigration policies, allowing practically anyone in who can get a reasonably paying job, instead of privileging the employment of its own citizens like most countries do.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler_(University_of...

I would take a look at Fukuyama's "Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay". The first hints of meritocracy were in China during the Qin and Han dynasties, where exams where used to provide positions in bureaucracy to those not of noble birth.

Prussia was really the first example of this in the west, where in 1770 all civil servants were required to pass a written exam.

I think the East India company were the first western group to copy the Qin exam based merit system [1].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

All the ones that speak the language you just wrote in.

More seriously any society not ruled by a hereditary nobility is a meritocracy. The nobility did not embrace this change - they just lost the war with the middle class.

I should say that no society is a perfect meritocracy and that the past winners are always conspiring to keep out the new, but overall most current societies in the modern world are a vast improvement over the old, inbred-nobility ruled alternative.

Nonsense. The Chinese have had a meritocratic civil service for ~1500 years. They spent the early 19th century being thrashed by the British who only established an exam based civil service in 1850s.

The Napoleonic French were a lot more meritocratic in their military and civilian career structure than the British who beat them on the seas.

The Chinese were not thrashed by the British in the early 19th C. - they were thrashed by the East India Company who had embraced meritocracy long before then (they actually copied the Chinese system).

Napoleon is a classic example of the success of meritocracy - it took the combined effort of the whole European nobility to defeat France and even then it was a close run thing.