How can you expect people to answer your question, if it is posed in obscure terms that you refuse to define?
How can you expect people to answer your question, if it is posed in obscure terms that you refuse to define?
I'm not intending to be critical, you understand, I'm genuinely unsure what you mean by "advantage" and "detriment". It seems to suggest some sort of corporatist conception of society, but that's too vague to actually suggest a framework for the sort of comparisons you seem to be after.
Not really. Castes could be as broad as "peasant", "merchant" and "noble", it didn't necessarily imply narrow occupational delineations. And even if it did, it's not obvious that would make much difference, because a fairly stable of division labour was present in plenty of pre-modern societies that lacked a caste system. In Western Europe, for example, people professionalised because it was economically necessary, despite the fact that the fact that the closest thing they had to a caste system was the broad and relatively porous Estates. Whatever efficiency was lost by people jumping between professions was probably compensated for by the room it made for a very limited meritocracy. (Observe the merchant-turned-royal functionary Geoffrey Chaucer, who's writings would not likely have come down to us if a rigid caste system had confined him to his fathers occupation of vintnery.)
Yeah, black people aren't really a thing. You can chillax now.
