Free The Peter Principle by Laurence Peter Page A

government, from the humblest party worker to the holders of the loftiest elective offices. Each tends to rise to his level and each post tends in time to be occupied by someone incompetent to carry out its duties.
    The Executive
    It will be obvious to you by now that the Principle applies also to the executive branch: government bureaus, departments, agencies and offices at the national, regional and local level. All, from police forces to armed forces, are rigid hierarchies of salaried employees, and all are necessarily cumbered with incompetents who cannot do their existing work, cannot be promoted, yet cannot be removed.
    Any government, whether it is a democracy, a dictatorship, a communistic or free enterprise bureaucracy, will fall when its hierarchy reaches an intolerable state of maturity. 1
    Equalitarianism and Incompetence
    The situation is worse than it used to be when civil service and military appointments were made through favoritism. This may sound heretical in an age of equalitarianism but allow me to explain.
    Consider an imaginary country called Pullovia, where civil service examinations, equality of opportunity and promotion by merit are unknown. Pullovia has a rigid class system, and the high ranks in all hierarchies—government, business, the armed forces, the church—are reserved for members of the dominant class.
    You will notice that I avoid the expression “upper class”; that term has unfortunate connotations. It is generally considered to refer to a class which is dominant by reason of aristocratic or genteel birth. But my conclusions apply also to systems in which the dominant class is marked off from the subordinate class by differences of religion, stature, race, language, dialect or political affiliation.
    It does not matter which of these is the criterion in Pullovia: the important fact is that the country has a dominant class and a subordinate class. This diagram represents a typical Pullovian hierarchy which has the classical pyramidal structure.

    The lower ranks—the area marked SC—are occupied by employees of the subordinate class. No matter how brilliant any of them may be, no one is eligible to rise above CB, the class barrier.
    The higher ranks—the area marked DC—are occupied by dominant-class employees. They do not start their careers at the bottom of the hierarchy, but at the level of the class barrier.
    Now, in the lower area, SC, it is obvious that many employees will never be able to rise high enough, because of the class barrier, to reach their level of incompetence. They will spend their whole careers working at tasks which they are able to do well. No one is promoted out of area SC, so this area keeps, and continually utilizes, its competent employees.
    Obviously, then, in the lower ranks of a hierarchy, the maintenance of a class barrier ensures a higher degree of efficiency than could possibly exist without the barrier.
    Now look at area DC, above the class barrier. As we have already seen, an employee’s prospects of reaching his level of incompetence are directly proportional to the number of ranks in the hierarchy—the more ranks, the more incompetence. The area DC, for all practical purposes, forms a closed hierarchy of a few ranks. Obviously, then, many of its employees will never reach their level of incompetence.
    Moreover, the prospect of starting near the top of the pyramid will attract to the hierarchy a group of brilliant employees who would never have come there at all if they had been forced to start at the bottom.
    Look at the situation another way. In Chapter 9 I shall discuss efficiency surveys, and shall show that the only effective way of increasing efficiency in a hierarchy is by the infusion of new blood at its upper levels. In most present-day systems, such infusion takes place at intervals, say after a reorganization, or during periods of rapid expansion. But in Pullovian hierarchies, it is a continuous process: new employees are regularly