> Most societies do demand that workers for important roles be selected on merit or based on other criteria known to all participants

Most societies become pretty practical after a while, and strive for people to be reliable and adequate for the roles they're appointed to play and celebrate the occasional master of some craft or pursuit. Being groomed for an opportunity from childhood, under the attention of one's family, often delivers on those and so a lot of societies don't worry about it except when it's obvious that somebody completely incompetent has ended up responsible for some influential or essential role.

It's actually a very peculiar modern experiment to expect every role to somehow be filled by the most capable person and for every person to be appointed a role that they're personally passionate about. Maybe it'll give us some amazing Star Trek utopia someday, but you don't see that idea expressed very much in history and so we don't really have reason to know what will happen if we try to make it so.

There's a very long history of trying to establish merit-based selection of government officials in, e.g., china. That's not to say there wasn't a lot of nepotism anyway, but I think it's also undeniable that the state was trying to reduce it, rather than just accepting it as normal and unavoidable.

Nowadays I would also guess that the majority of people across the globe live in societies where nepotism is conceived of as bad. There might still be various amounts of it but people generally tend to discourage or punish nepotism when they can.

It's not enough to strive for people to be reliable and adequate. You need a system that selects reliably for such people. Being groomed for a job from childhood is not reliable enough. Many people will be good enough for the job, but many will not. The problem becomes bigger the higher up you go in the society. Meritocracy won, both in economy and in war, because the people in charge in non-meritocratic societies are too often grossly incompetent.

Yeah, this. Also, in most advanced societies, it isn't particularly likely that your kid wants to work at whatever you were doing.

But there are a bunch of services helping "teach the test" for kids going to college/grad school, and in very, very many ways, middle class (or better off) parents do strive to give their kids tons of advantages that other kids do not have. Is it fair that my kid had access to their own computer and all the books they wanted to read, etc., when others didn't? No, but parents are still going to help their kids.

If we had something resembling a really fair system, kids and adults of any age would be able to take classes and learn whatever, with as much help as they needed. It would be expensive, but fair. That isn't what we have.

Given the age of this piece, where it was common to determine your kids' spouses well before they can conceptualize what marriange is, I can see nepotism being farther down the list of great immoral acts.

But yes, I would argue nepotism is prevalent in nearly all societies.