Many people who work in the system often complain about the rigidity of their organisation: they are clearly more capable and work harder than their colleagues, but their superiors never see it, and they are still required to promote those who are less qualified but older than them. But if you think about it, you might realize that seniority isn't so bad a lot of the time. Imagine what would happen if you had a desk job in an agency that promoted people based on performance rather than seniority? In many cases, you will find that if the rule of promotion is "merit," then your relationship with the leader becomes very important. First of all, the performance of civilian work is highly subjective in the assessment, there is no way to use many quantifiable indicators to measure. Whether your work attitude is good or bad depends on how your immediate supervisor feels about you. Second, if you don't have a good relationship with your boss, he's likely to always give you some of the worst tasks and give the easier, more productive ones to people close to him. So, you will find that in those organizations that claim to be merit-based, in fact, the prevailing rule is that they are family-oriented. If that's the case, then seniority doesn't look so bad. At the very least, this system keeps the authority in check and ensures that if you work hard and don't make big mistakes, you can get the promotion you deserve without having to worry all day about some crafty colleague trying to curry favor with the boss and take away the opportunities you deserve. You may ask, since seniority constrains the power of leaders, why do many leaders prefer to use seniority rather than any other rule? Don't leaders like having more power for themselves? In many cases, it is. The leader himself cares more about the performance of his organization, so he wants his subordinates to focus on getting the job done, not on sucking up to himself. Bentt Holmstrom, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied this situation. His classic paper Moral Hazard and Observability, published in the Bell Journal of Economics in 1979, established him as an authority in the field of information economics. The "information quantity principle" proposed by Holmstrom explicitly discusses how the best contract should link the agent's reward with the performance-related information. He shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics with Oliver Hart of Harvard University for pioneering work in the field of information economics. Holmstrom's "information content principle" has very important practical implications. In the design of incentive contracts, if there are two variables, one easy to measure and the other not easy to measure, the variable that is easy to measure is provided with a very strong incentive, the variable that is not easy to measure will not have any incentive. If the behavior distortions caused by looking at both variables are severe, then it may be best to ignore the easily measured variable. In the previous example, actively completing the tasks assigned by the leader can send a message to the leader about his or her efforts, while having coffee with the leader can give him or her a more comprehensive understanding of himself or herself, allowing the leader to gain other information about himself or herself, such as personality, hobbies, interpersonal skills, etc. From the leader's point of view, the more information he knows, the better, if it comes at no cost. But the problem is that if a subordinate finds it easier to send a message by chatting with a leader than to send a message by doing a good job himself, he is less motivated to do his job. And the harder it is to measure performance accurately, the worse the problem becomes. For example, if you're in sales and your job is sales, you can skip coffee with your boss. But if you're a desk clerk and your performance is evaluated based on subjective scores on multiple projects, small talk with your boss becomes important. Holmstrom's theory suggests that while a leader may be able to gain more personal information from an underling by regularly chatting over coffee, once the underling thinks it's possible to get rewards in this way, The attempt by the leader to obtain this information distorts the distribution of subordinates' energy -- and the rational employee diverts much of his or her energy from doing his or her job to figuring out how to have a good cup of coffee with the leader. In other words, as long as the leader is trying to obtain information from subordinates, subordinates must have incentives to distort the time allocation, or even the information itself. In this case, it may be in the best interest of the organization for the leader to proactively cut off this informal channel of information. So don't worry if you find that your boss rarely talks to you about anything outside of your job and never goes for coffee or dinner with you. It's not necessarily because of his management style, but because he prefers that each of you be fully focused on your job. In politics, refusing to accept any additional information in favor of a seemingly "rigid" formula has been a recipe for a stable succession of political power since ancient times. In the system of succession to the throne, there is a tradition in the history of many countries of "establishing a long man but not a good man". In a state of primogeniture, political power is transferred according to the rules of seniority, rather than the ability of princes to determine heirs. This is because the eldest son of a legitimate wife is unique, and it is difficult to say what is the standard of wisdom and how to determine whether a prince is wise or not. If the wise depended on the examination, then there would surely be princes to entice the examiners to cheat, and the sages would become a competition of who was better at wooing the examiners, and then a competition of who was better at establishing friends and power in the court. If the princes were all powerful in the court, what would happen to the emperor? If the emperor lived a long life, he ran the risk of being suspended and put under house arrest. If military power is the key to wisdom, the Ottoman Empire is an example. In the Ottoman Empire, princes would be sent to various military districts of the empire to control the armies there, and which prince would become sultan would depend on military merit. Obviously, every succession to the throne led to civil war. Thus, starting in the late 14th century, a very bloody "parricide" law began to emerge within the Ottoman royal family, allowing the sultan to execute all male relatives except his own sons upon ascending the throne in order to consolidate the state's power. A similar example was Li Shimin, Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, who launched the "Xuanwu Gate Revolt" to seize power by killing his brother and putting his father, Emperor Gaozu Li Yuan, under house arrest. This tragic situation is obviously related to the practice of Li Yuan, Emperor Gazu of the Tang Dynasty, in the very beginning to let his sons participate in the command of wars and management of "business departments" such as Baiguan. Since the cost of knowing which prince is wiser is so high, it is better to cut off the information channel completely and choose the heir according to the age of the eldest son. If the eldest son's ability to govern is limited, talented people are selected through an examination to form a professional group of civil servants to assist the future monarch. It obviously makes the monarch and all princes safer and the country more stable than the father-son rivalry and brother-brother rivalry that can result from making a good man. In this sense, we may better understand why institutions that seem rigid are actually efficient. What the economists' research, including Holmstrom's paper on these issues, tells us is that whether the system is an effective design depends in large part on our ability to prevent the distorting or counterproductive outcomes that might occur under the system. If it can be eliminated, then the system design is effective.