Tarun KHANNA & Michael SZONYI (eds), Making Meritocracy. Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present

The intellectual and political debate on merit as a criterion for the distribution of the most relevant social resources and on meritocracy, i.e. the type of society governed by it, is now being conducted in several Western and Asian countries. The arguments presented against the use of this distribution criterion are frequently of a philosophical nature, with a considerable number of cases also being ideological. There are, however, few instances where the arguments are based on empirical e...