Sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Patronage is thus inevitable, and it does come with costs. At its worst, patrons unthinkingly select their friends and relations, or their political allies, selected for loyalty and allegiance, demonstrated in some very different domain to that of the role in question. But it can also come with benefits. Confronted with our five promising lieutenants, the decision-maker at the Admiralty might recall that one of them is that nephew of his who, as a lad, never backed down from scraps and often won fights against much bigger boys. This sort of private but very useful information can be easily factored into decisions in a world where patronage is allowed to operate in a fairly unfettered manner. And indeed evidence suggests that naval officers with powerful friends at the Admiralty performed substantially better in battle, indicating that the patrons – especially in wartime – were judiciously using their power to select on important but low-visibility criteria.
Patronage can be viewed, therefore, as a mechanism to both improve average outcomes, but also increase the variance: on the whole things are better, and you get more top performers, but you also get more disasters. Clearly a mechanism will be needed to remove the underperformers. The Royal Navy, for instance, court-martialled every single post-captain who lost a ship. Most were of course exonerated, but for those who were judged not to have fought well enough, the penalties were severe: a permanent ban from naval command in many cases, death in a few.
Admiral John Bnyg was one of the unlucky ones. Judged to have not fought aggressively enough in the Battle of Minorca (1756) he was convicted to death under the Articles of War, although it was widely expected that George II would commute the sentence. The King declined and Byng was duly executed. Byng had lost no ships and was in many ways a victim of blunders at the Admiralty he was not responsible for. Nonetheless, the Articles of War constituted a strict incentive structure, applying to all ranks equally, that aimed to cajole naval officers to fight to the death rather than withdraw from battle (something that was and is much easier to do at sea than on land).