Nelson, patronage, and meritocracy

AND: Write your own poems!

Nelson and the nepo-babies

For the FT, I wrote about the way patronage can be used to improve meritocracy.

But it wasn’t like that at sea. A 2019 study of the Navy between 1690-1849, by Joachim Voth and Guo Xu, examined the effect of patronage on performance. It looked at more than 4,000 promotions to see the difference between officers who had been promoted by a relative or patron and officers promoted by someone with no personal connection. The essential promotion is to the rank of captain. These officers had command of a ship, and were essential to naval performance.

Their performance is easy to measure: ships sunk. It found that promotions were largely meritocratic, even when patronage was involved (unlike the Army, Navy commissions could not be bought). More surprisingly, the connected officers outperformed the unconnected ones. The nepo-babies really were more likely to sink, burn or capture enemy ships, regardless of the ship they were given command of or their position in the battle line. They were also more likely to win one-to-one encounters.

Compared with the officers who did not have personal connections, these nepo-babies had one standout quality: fewer of the battles they fought ended in a draw. (They also lost fewer ships.) The study authors say, “In essence, connected officers either lost or won and never experienced a draw; whereas nearly a fourth of all unconnected officers fought indecisive engagements.”

Plenty more in the full piece.

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Write your own poems!

I read that in Japan it is normal for many people to submit waka and haiku to be published in newspapers.

Let’s do that here. Add your own poems (preferably short!) to this thread. I’m sure we have many capable and enthusiastic poets among us… there are already quite a few in there.

(I read this in “The Japanese Sense of Beauty” by Takashina Shuji, btw.)