[robotresearcher]

Governments and the church have supported that career structure for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. For example, military officers take salary, perks and retirement.

Also large, long lived companies like the 17th century East India Company employed tens of thousands of people, many for decades.

China also has centuries old companies and civil service institutions.

Neither entrepreneurs nor megacorps are recent inventions.

[barry-cotter]

True but hardly relevant to the great majority of people throughout history. The modern civil service is a copy of the Chinese Imperial model but outside the Sinosphetr that started in what the ~1800’s? In China throughout the vast majority of its history you had well under one professional, career civil servant per 1,000 of population. The professionalised military is also a creature of the European Wars of Religion at the earliest. Officers didn’t get pensions, they got the opportunity to loot and if they survived and were lucky they got land. Converting officers from nobles or mercenary captains who brought their own men and equipped them to military civil servants was a long drawn out process.

Parastatal companies like the EIC or VOC were products of societies that had just barely mastered professional rather than personal administration. They were also very unusual. Setting them up took special acts of the legislature and vanishingly small portions of the population served in them, or any similar organisation.

Professional bureaucratic organisations outside the state were absolutely in place by the Renaissance, like Florentine banking houses but they were small.

Entrepreneurs and mega corps are not recent inventions but mega corps not intimately entwines with the state are. In what Francis Fukuyama calls a closed access order they’re impossible and open access orders are at most two centuries old. See his book, Origins of Political Order.

The efflorescence of megacorps, outside the state, that could believably promise a lifetime career with the security of the civil service was a time limited thing.

[robotresearcher]

Well, if you'd said "was efflorescent for 40 years" and not "existed for 40 years", I wouldn't have had any beef :)

[C1sc0cat]

No the modern western civil services are not a copy of the Chinese system - it was developed to replace nepotism and fraud.

[barry-cotter]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service

> The origins of the British civil service are better known. During the eighteenth century a number of Englishmen wrote in praise of the Chinese examination system, some of them going so far as to urge the adoption for England of something similar. The first concrete step in this direction was taken by the British East India Company in 1806.

> Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in Guangzhou, China argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China, published in 1847, that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only," and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic.

> Influenced by the Chinese imperial examinations, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854 made four principal recommendations: that recruitment should be on the basis of merit determined through competitive examination, that candidates should have a solid general education to enable inter-departmental transfers, that recruits should be graded into a hierarchy and that promotion should be through achievement, rather than "preferment, patronage or purchase"

[C1sc0cat]

Interesting I never knew that. I thought it came from the reforms post restoration in particular the Royal Navy.

Downside is it prioritises a classical education and the cult of the amateur chap who did a PPE but doesn't have any serious domain knowledge (Jen from the IT crowd)

[barry-cotter]

No reason it can’t be multicausal, or that the actual reasons and the intellectual window dressing can’t be utterly at odds. Dewey’s American educational philosophy is very different from the Prussian model of schools as a factory for good, loyal subjects but while American teachers are taught about Dewey the system they work in is a Prussian one.