One of the biggest challenge on the road to meritocracy will be building a sustainable organisation/ political party to support this change. Making a rough back of the envelope calculation, I would say the party would need 1 active volunteer for every 100 people in the population, and 1 leader/active participant for every 10 volunteers. Therefore, the core group would be ideally around 1% of the target population. That may appear small, but translates to around 10K active volunteers for a population of 1 million. Based on this, the approximate number of active volunteers & leaders needed to take the movement to a national level for some countries would be as follows:
China: 17.7M volunteers, 2M leaders
India: 12.7M volunteers, 1M leaders
USA: 3.2M volunteers, 300k leaders
Brazil: 2M volunteers, 200k leaders
Russia: 1.5M volunteers, 150k leaders
Japan: 1.3M volunteers, 130k leaders
Germany: 810k volunteers, 80k leaders
France: 660k volunteers, 66k leaders
UK: 640k volunteers, 64k leaders
South Africa: 540k volunteers, 54k leaders
Canada: 360k volunteers, 36k leaders
UAE: 100k volunteers, 10k leaders
Luxembourg: 6K volunteers, 600 leaders
United States Department of Defense, the largest employer in the world, employs 3.2 million people.
The key point that I am trying to make is that the project would involve building an extremely large organisation, and will be harder for bigger countries. To be sustainable, at the minimum it would need a cohesive ideology that appeals to its members (both emotionally and logically), a suitable organisation structure, an effective fund-raising strategy, an effective succession mechanism, a party constitution, and an effective marketing strategy.
With this view, I hereby begin the first draft for a sample consitution for a party whose sole motto is the progress of the nation based on the principles of meritocracy. The constitution is a work in progress and I will share it with you once it is in a respectable shape. Please feel free to pitch in your suggestions in the comments below, or just email me.
