Christmas at the Gandersheim Kommando by Robert Antelme

“The naked humanity that marks a famished face can appear in only a few, barely differentiated forms.”- Manes Sperber

In our little room there’s a crowd around the stove. Those who got there first sat themselves right down on the benches. Everyone holds his bread in his hand. Somebody says, “With this we are in great shape. One hell of a Christmas dinner, right?”

They were glancing intermittently at the bread, and appeared to be thinking. The benches were all taken, and I wasn’t able to sit down. I crowded in close up behind a bench and got the stove’s heat directly in the face. I cut a slice of bread, spread some ground meat on top of it, and reached my arm out over the shoulder of the guy in front of me, who leaned forward without complaining. I set the slice on the stove; others were doing the same thing. The stove was very hot. The fat from the meat melted quickly, and the red meat turned brown. The stove was covered with slices, and some guys had to scrap to find a little room for theirs. If he allowed it they would move a guy’s bread aside; but as soon as they pushed his slice a little too far and made it hang over the edge, he would complain, turn around and look at whoever it was, who would seem to apologize, although would leave their slices where they were. Then the guy who was complaining would push somebody else’s slice, in order to get his back on the stove, and so there would be complaints from another guy too, and voices would rise.

“You’re a pain in the ass. You ought to have gotten here sooner. The same ones always drag their ass and then want to be first.”

“All right, all right, don’t get excited. Hey, we aren’t going to yell at each other tonight.”

“I’m not yelling at you. Just don’t go too far.”

And it didn’t go any farther than that. An odor arose, the odor of bakeries and grilled meat and rich people’s breakfasts. But those back home, if they were eating bacon, if they were eating toast, they weren’t aware of how it had transformed, how it had started to change color, to roast, above all to smell, to give off this powerful odor; but we’d been given gray bread and we’d cut our slices and we’d put them on the stove ourselves, And now we were watching the bread turn into cake. Nothing escaped us. The meat was oozing, glowing, giving off the terrific odor of something to eat. For us, bread or potatoes that you bite into still had taste; but the something to eat that from a far fills mouth and throat and stomach with its odor –what that could be like, that odor, that was something we had forgotten.

I retrieved my slice. It was burning hot, it was like brioche; it was more than a jewel, it was something alive, a source of joy. It was slightly puffy, and the fat had permeated the soft part of the bread and made it glow. I bit off the first mouthful; as they sank into the bread, my teeth made a noise that filled my ears. It was a paradise of perfume, of juice and food. Everything was to eat. My tongue, my palate were overcome; I was afraid of losing some of it. I chewed it, and it was everywhere, on my lips, on my tongue, between my teeth; the inside of my mouth was a cave, and the food was parading around insider. Finally I swallowed it; it was gone. Once I had nothing more in my mouth the emptiness was intolerable. More. More. The word had been devised for tongue and palate. One more mouthful. One more mouthful. It mustn’t end. The crunching and tasting and licking machine was turned on. Never, as it did then, had my mouth felt itself to be something that couldn’t be fulfilled, that nothing could satisfy once and for all, that would be forever in need of something more.

Everyone ate solemnly. Some wanted to take no chances and were eating the bread cold, the way it had been given to them. They didn’t want to try a different world, they didn’t want to tempt themselves. Around here you mustn’t play about awakening too many demands, resurrecting too many buried tastes; eating something like that – something that couldn’t be any better- was dangerous.  Those guys seemed more detached. Instead of cutting their bread carefully into slices, they tore it into pieces, haphazardly; and they kept the pieces in their hands, as they would have done at home; their elbows on their knees, looking grave and austere.

I finished up the last mouthfuls. I’d found a seat on the bench.  Now the only thing to do was to warm myself, my head leaning forward, my hands stretched out towards the stove.  .  .

………………………………………………………………………………….

It’s an SS fantasy to believe that we have an historical mission to change species, and as this mutation is occurring too slowly, they kill. No, this extraordinary sickness is nothing other than a culminating moment in man’s history. And that means two things. First, that the solidity and stability of the species is being put to the test. Next, that the variety of relationships between men, their color, their customs, the classes they form into mask the truth that here, at the boundary of nature, at the point where we approach our limits, appears with absolute clarity: namely, that there are not several human races, there is only one human race. It’s because we’re men like them that the SS will finally prove powerless before us, It’s because they shall have sought to call the unity of this human race into question that they’ll finally be crushed.

Yet their behavior, and our situation, are only a magnification, an extreme caricature – in which nobody wants or is perhaps able to recognize himself – of forms of behavior and of situations that exist in the world, that even make up the existence of that older “real world” we dream about. For in fact everything happens in the world as though there were a number of human species, or, rather, as though belonging to a single human species wasn’t certain, as though you could join the species or leave it, could be halfway in it or belong to it fully, or never belong to it, try though you might for generations, division into races or classes being the canon of the species and sustaining the axiom we’re always prepared to use, the ultimate line of defense: “They aren’t people like us.”

And so, seen from here, luxuriousness is the property of the animal, and divineness is the property of trees, and we are unable to become either animals or trees. We are not able to, and the SS cannot make us succeed in it. And it is just when it has taken on the most hideous shape, it is just when it is about to become our own face- that is when the mask falls. And if, at that moment, we believe what, here, is certainly that which requires the most considerable effort to believe, that “The SS are only men like ourselves”; if, at that moment when the distance between beings is at its greatest, at the moment when the subjugation of some and the power of others have attained its limits as to seem frozen into some supernatural distinction; if, facing nature, or facing death, we an perceive no substantial difference between the SS and ourselves, then we have to say there is only one human race.

And we have to say that everything which masks this unity, everything that places beings in situations of exploitation and subjugation and thereby implies the existence of various species of mankind, is false and mad; and we have the proof of this here, the most irrefutable proof, since the worst of victims cannot do otherwise than establish that, in its worst exercise, the executioner’s power cannot be other than one of the powers that men have, the power to murder. He can kill a man but he can’t change him into something else.

This Book by Werner Sollors

It is the task of this book to retrace stories and reexamine images of the end of the war and early years of military occupation in Germany, stories that were then believed to be plausible  attempts at capturing a strange and unfamiliar reality, but that have meanwhile been largely replaced by the mythic success story that seems to have swallowed up most others in public memory. These stories can be found in letters, often written in very small handwriting and up to the edge of each page so as to get the most words onto the precious sheets of paper, and at times marked by censors’ deletions; in diaries that may include strange pieces of evidence collected in apparent disbelief – diaries that were also at times altered and adjusted in later years; in official, mimeographed communications, reports, studies, and orders; in newsreel footage accompanied by blaring marchlike musical introductions and the then-so-popular agitated shouting voices of announcers; in “unabridged” or “uncensored abridged” mass media paperbacks with lurid covers and improbably exaggerated blurbs; in newspapers and illustrated magazines; and in many of the other media that were then available.

In many cases, these tales point to shared themes and experiences, to moments that seemed particularly noteworthy, aspects that were so haunting or enticing or amusing as to be present in many sources, even if viewed from rather different angles. I have made an effort to hover over such moments, describing the different reactions they provoked and the dialogues some of them inspired, or could have inspired. Some of the stories are fully told, others are often only implied; they may be verbal or visual; they may be romances or gothic horror tales, elegiac or defiant, sentimental plots or tough stories of revenge; they may be religious or secular in orientation, reactionary, conservative, liberal, or left-wing dramas. Yet they would seem to add up to a chorus of voices that articulated tales of the postwar 1940s in which people then recognized themselves.

This book does not aim for a comprehensive account of the period but for an inward understanding of a cultural moment through a close focus on a few particularly striking examples. When I use the term inward, I did not mean to refer to an inner private sphere, as distinguished from the public realm of politics, something that the German word Innerlichkeit has suggested at times. I also did not mean to imply that a Swedish report on post-war Germany or a British photograph taken there were somehow “outward”. Instead, what I was after in the works I studied was what might get lost in quick generalizations, bullet-point summaries, or abstract debates. In all parts of this book I have therefore attempted to stay close to the sources, quote extensively from texts, and examine exemplary photographs and films at very close range, not as thematic exhibits and illustrations of conclusions I arrived at earlier, but as aesthetic objects that make a moment or an issue come to life in such a way that it stays with the reader and viewer beyond any single maxim or conclusion that could be drawn from them.

This meant engaging with the writers and artists together with their metaphors and images, with the contemporary reception, and sometimes even with plot-lines that seemed implied but were aborted in a given work. I can only hope that showing the struggles and hesitations at the a stages of composition of a film script, the cropping and captioning of a photograph, or the revisions of the text of a diary   come across to the reader as an effort  to respect the dynamic quality of the forms I examined and to understand aesthetic modes of expression themselves as an active part in the historical process and not just a reflection of it. A famous quip has it that poetry is what gets lost in translation. My attempt in this book has been to hover on what would get lost in summary.

Combat Psychiatry by Eric Jaffe

The first lesson that should have been learned from the Great War was that many men would break.  America’s armed forces suffered one psychiatric casualty for every four physical wounds over the course of the conflict. The ‘fifth man,” some called him. The military had tapped Thomas W. Salmon, the same physician who’d created psychiatric services for immigrants at Ellis Island years earlier, to establish a mental health program for American soldiers heading overseas. “The extent of these casualties is almost beyond belief,” Salmon wrote in June 1917, upon reaching Europe in advance of U.S. troops. “I have not yet had access to the official records but apparently the neuroses constitute one of the most formidable problems of modern war.”

In a typical case of “ shell shock,” the term of choice during the Great War, a parade of stressors chipped away at a soldier’s stability. Days under fire, nights in a foxhole, little food and water, very little sleep. Then an artillery shell would explode nearby, maybe tossing him to the ground or killing a buddy, and something inside snapped.  By the close of the conflict a clear relationship had been established between the intensity of combat and the rate of mental breakdowns.* In early 1918 a military psychiatrist saw eighteen cases of shell shock during a full six weeks of low battlefield activity. Then he saw fifty-two cases during a harsh four-day attack, and forty-three more during a rough two-day raid.

Shell-shocked soldiers became noticeably delusional and confused. Some presented uncontrollable twitches. Some stiffened into fearful statues. Some had haunting visions of carnage. Some lost memories, or control of their emotions, or motor skills. Some showed a severe startle reflex whenever a door slammed shut, or a plate hit the floor, or a chair toppled over. Often these wounds followed a soldier home from war. One anonymous soldier, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1921, wished he could convey to the public “how dreadfully alone a shell-shocked man can be, even though surrounded by those who love him most.”

One glimmer of hope during the Great War was the realization that mental casualties who received urgent treatment near the front lines had a good chance of recovering. At first, American soldiers were evacuated hundreds of miles to the U.S. General Hospitals positioned far behind the front lines. In severe cases they returned stateside on a hospital ship. This delayed treatment gave the disabilities time to set in and enabled patients to embrace the ailment as a ticket home. On the contrary, the soldiers who received hot food, rest reassurance close to the lines often made quick and complete recoveries. The best care occurred within a few hours of onset and “within the sound of artillery,” wrote Salmon.

The combat psychiatrists deployed in 1918 used simple and effective methods. They were stationed in frontline triage areas, as opposed to traditional hospitals. They emphasized the honor of battle and reminded patients that their buddies were still out there fighting. Thy showed pictures of German prisoners to evoke patriotic responses. Soldiers suspected of malingering were given awful jobs, like digging latrines, to discourage any trickery. The numbers testified to their success: anywhere from 65 to 85 percent of soldiers treated within days of their breakdown returned to combat.

“In hospitals close behind the lines there is still the atmosphere of the front and a mental tone which comes from mass suggestion of men striving shoulder to shoulder,” wrote one psychiatrist at the time. “Out of danger, far from the front, perhaps among hero-worshiping friends, the invalid is unavoidably conscious of himself more as an individual and less a link in the battle line.”

After the war, however, many military psychiatrists suggested that only mental weaklings with underlying emotional instabilities had broken down in combat. This thinking held that any neurotic tendencies concealed in the comforts of civilian life would be exposed under the peculiar stresses of the military. “The neurotic is so intensely individualistic that under the new and rigid conditions of service he finds impossible to adapt and so breaks down.”  Officials thought that they had discovered a basic law of military psychiatry: stop individuals with mental instabilities from entering the service, and you’d stop soldiers from suffering mental wounds on the battlefield.

At any rate, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, military leaders paid little attention to any of its mental health lessons. A military medical manual published in 1937 devoted just one of its 685 pages to mental health. Toward the late 1930s, as the prospect of another global war became distinct, military consultants made a critical mistake: they ignored what they’d learned about treatment on the front lines and instead pushed an aggressive stance toward screening-out the so-called weaklings. If civilian psychiatrists could eliminate psychoneurotic individuals during enlistment, then division psychiatrists would no longer be necessary during combat.

So it happened that the American military entered the Second World War having forgotten a key lesson from the first one. In late September of 1940, Winfred Overholser, the head of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, sent a memo to President Franklin Roosevelt describing the potential advantages of establishing a screening system at induction centers. Money as much as medicine, encouraged this approach. Overholser estimated that neuropsychiatric casualties from the Great War had cost the country close to a billion dollars. In November the Selective Service System adopted an intense screening program  for new soldiers, and in 1941 the position of division neuropsychiatrist was dropped from personnel rosters.. By the time soldiers shipped out for World War II, the closest a military psychiatrist could get to the action was the general hospital.

Despite the heavy screening process, mental casualties piled into military hospital beds. By the middle of 1943 neuropsychiatric cases made up 15 to 25 percent of all battle casualties in many campaigns. An annual summary of the problem reported a hospital admission  rate of 60 neuropsychiatric cases per 1,000 men in overseas battles, compared to a rate of roughly 17 per 1,000 in the Great War. The disparity was startling. In the earlier conflict screenors removed just 2 percent of enlistees. This meant that even with an examination process at least four times more rigorous in World War II, the U.S. military had a psychiatric incident rate nearly four times as high as that in World War I.

As of August 1943, the Army was discharging 115,000 men a year for neuropsychiatric reasons – by far the most of any category. It was an unprecedented pace. From a perspective of military manpower, it was also an unsustainable one.

By Fall the entire approach to American psychiatry was being questioned. The underlying principle of the screening program was that everyone who broke down in war had entered the service with an identifiable mental weakness, but reports from the field told a very different story. During the rough Sicilian campaign, a veteran division produced more psychiatric casualties than a group of fresh troops.  That didn’t mean veterans weren’t tough – but rather that the rigors of war could break even strong minds… If screening were to weed out everybody who might develop a psychiatric disorder, it would be necessary to weed out everybody.

A comprehensive military psychiatric program would not only keep abnormal minds out of the Army, it would treat the normal ones in it. This shift in strategy was reinforced through a series of official directives issued between September and November of 1943. The surgeon general circulated a letter to every medical officer summarizing the new stance. Mental casualties would be considered urgent cases, and treated urgently. They should be labeled “exhaustion”- not “war neurosis” or “shell shock” or the like – to soften the stigma of the problem, to underscore its universality, and to suggest imminent recovery. The psychological and physical factors that led to a breakdown should be detected early and, whenever possible, prevented from escalating. General policy was moving away from the elimination of manpower and towards its conservation.

Executing this initiative meant moving psychiatrists up near the action, but high military officials ignored several calls to re-institute the division neuropsychiatrist. One early request, made back in April of 1942, had been rejected on the grounds that psychiatrists couldn’t perform their job “under the present type of mobile warfare.” Anther request, made the following March, had been rebuffed by an officer who didn’t believe “anything of real value can be accomplished by psychiatrists with the division in combat.”  Only after Surgeon General Norman T. Kirk took the matter to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall – a notorious skeptic of mental casualties – was the position approved.

In December 1943 the Army ordered all sixty of the newly appointed division neuropsychiatrists to Walter Reed Medical Center, for a three-day orientation, an intellectual boot camp in military psychiatry. The proceedings were led by Lieutenant Colonel William C. Menninger. He emphasized early detection, helping officers develop a keen eye for the personality changes, emotional outbursts, and general anxiety signaling mental casualties. The second pillar of his program for prevention was motivation. In 1943 too few American soldiers possessed sufficient morale – “a will to fight stronger than a will to live.” One out of every three soldiers felt their task in World War II was not worthwhile, according to a survey. And American troops hardly even knew anything about their enemy. Psychiatrists feared this low fighting interest made troops particularly susceptible to the stresses of war. In response five “Why We Fight” films were produced, directed by Frank Capra with the help of Ivy League psychology and sociology experts and a writer by the name of Theodor Geisel- better known as Dr. Seuss.

A strong preventive program might minimize mental casualties, but by 1943 no one suffered the illusion of eliminating them so treatment was the other main topic at the Washington conference. Each of the division got a copy of War Neurosis in North Africa by Roy Grinker and John Spiegal, considered ‘the Bible” of Combat Psychiatry at the time. But the entire morning session of December 15 was given over to Fredrick R. Hanson, described as clever, energetic, and possessing a “low and calm” voice, Hanson had been way in front of the division psychiatrist curve. He recommended the position be created all the way back in an August 1942 communication to the surgeon general. His work in the North African theater, in the spring of 1943, confirmed that fatigue played a leading role in mental casualties. Treat exhaustion, Hansen believed, and you’d improve psychological stability.

As a result, Hansen devised a fairly simple regime of rest and reassurance for psychiatric cases. He put them to sleep for long periods with barbiturates, awakened them only for meals, then after a day or so discussed the universality of fear and urged them to rejoin the fighting. It was very much in the style of combat psychiatry from World Wear I, and it was equally effective; Hansen returned 60 percent of his cases to combat within four days, and 89 percent of those remained in action month later. Hansen’s lessons, above all others, would guide the work of division psychiatrists on the battlefield.

As a general ruler, the sixty division psychiatrists were greeted  with suspicion and granted little in the way of authority. Their commanders expected them to make wholesale discharges. Some were called “nut-pickers” who belonged in lunatic asylums, not among units of good old “red-blooded” American soldiers. Many officials still felt psychiatric cases were simply weaklings or malingerers. At the most, they saw the new division neuro-psychiatrists as a tool for disposing of soldiers who didn’t meet their models of manhood. Even officers who acknowledged the existence of mental casualties were hesitant to put recovered cases back at the front for fear other troops would no longer respect them.

The topic didn’t really enter civilian discourse until the infamous “slapping” incidents involving General George S. Patton in late November 1943. . . “It has come to my attention that a very small number of soldiers are going to the hospital on the pretext that they are nervously incapable of combat. Such men are cowards, and bring discredit on the Army and disgrace to their comrades who they heartlessly leave to endure the field of battle which they themselves use the hospital as a means of escaping.” Patton’s own formal apology to Eisenhower revealed a belief that only tough love could treat “mental anguish.” It closed with the supercilious suggestion that by slapping each broken soldier, Patton had “saved an immortal soul.”

* [ however, the specific act of killing as an important cause ‘shell shock’ (PTSS) was not recognized until after WWII http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2010/09/on-killing-by-lt-col-dave-grossman.html]

University Endowments, Education and Social Mobility by Thomas Piketty

In order to gain a better understanding of unequal returns on capital without being distracted by the issues of individual character, it is useful to look at what has happened with the endowments of American universities over the past few decades. Indeed, this is one of the few cases where we have very complete data about investments made and returns received over a relatively long period of times, as a function of initial capital.

There are currently more than eight hundred public and private universities in the United States that manage their own endowments. These endowments range from some tens of millions of dollars (for example, North Iowa Community College, ranked 785^th with an endowment of $11.5 million) to tens of billions. The top-ranked universities are invariably Harvard (with an endowment of some $30 billion in the early 2010s), Yale (420 billion), and Princeton and Stanford (more than $15 billion). Then come MIT and Columbia, with a little less than $10 billion, then Chicago and Pennsylvania, at around $7 billion, and so on. All told, these eight hundred US universities owned nearly $400 billion worth of assets in 2010 (or a little under $500 million per university on average, with a median slightly less that $100 million.) To be sure, this is less than 1 percent of the total private wealth of US households, but it is still a large sum, which annually yields significant income for US universities – at any rate some of them.

Above all – and this is the point that is of interest here – US universities publish regular, reliable, and detailed reports on their endowments, which can be used to study the annual returns each institution obtains. This is not possible with most private fortunes . In particular, these data have been collected since the late 1970s by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, which has published voluminous statistical surveys every year since 1979.

The main results I have been able to derive from these data are shown in Table 12.2. The first conclusion is that the return on US university endowments has been extremely high in recent decades, averaging 8.2 percent a year between 1980 and 2010 (and 7.2 percent for the period 1990-2010). To be sure, there have been ups and downs in each decade, with years of low and even negative returns, such as 2008-2009, and good years in which the average endowment grew by more than 10 percent. But the important point is that if we average over ten, twenty, or thirty years, we find extremely high returns, of the same sort I examined for the billionaires in the Forbes rankings.

To be clear, the returns indicated in Table 12.2 are net real returns allowing for capital gains and inflation, prevailing taxes (virtually non-existent for nonprofit institutions) and management fees. (the latter include the salaries of everyone inside or outside the university who is involved in planning and executing the institution’s investment strategy. Hence these figures reflect the pure return on capital as defined in this book, that is, the return that comes simply from owning capital, apart from any remuneration of the labor required to manage it.

The second conclusion that emerges clearly from Table 12.2 is that the return increases rapidly with the size of the endowment. For the 500 of 850 universities whose endowment was less than $100 million, the average return was 6.2 percent in 1980-2010 (and 5.1 percent in 1990-2010), which is already fairly high and significantly above the average return on all private wealth in these periods. The greater the endowment, the greater the return. For the 60 universities with endowments of more than $1 billion, the average return was 8.8 percent in 1980-2010 (and 7.8 percent in 1990-2010). For the top trio (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), which has not changed since 1980, the yield was 10.23 percent in 19080-2010 (and 10.0 percent in 1990-2010, twice as much as the less well-endowed institutions.

If we look at the investment strategies of different universities, we find highly diversified portfolios at all levels, with a clear preference for US and foreign stocks and private sector bonds (government bonds, especially US Treasuries, which do not pay well, account for less than 10 percent of all these portfolios and are almost totally absent from the largest endowments). The higher we go in the endowment hierarchy, the more often we find “alternative investment strategies,” that is, very high yield investments such as shares in private equity funds and unlisted foreign stocks (which require great expertise), hedge funds, derivatives, real estate, and raw materials, including energy, natural resources, and related products (these, too, require specialized expertise and offer very high potential yields).

If we consider the important of these various portfolios of “alternative investments,” whose only common feature is that they abandon the usual strategies of investing in stocks and bonds accessible to all, we find that they represent only 10 percent of the portfolios of institutions with endowments of less than 50 million euros, 25 percent of those with endowments between 50 and 100 million euros, 35 percent of those between 100 and 500 million euros, 45 percent of those between 500 million and 1 billion euros, and ultimately more than 60 percent of those above 1 billion euros. The available data, which are both public and extremely detailed, show unambiguously that it is these alternative investment strategies that enable the very largest endowments to obtain real returns of close to 10 percent a year, while smaller endowments must make do with 5 percent.

The returns obtained by Harvard and Yale vary around their means but not much more so than the returns of smaller institutions, and if one averages over several years, the mean returns of the largest endowments are systematically higher than those of the smaller ones, with a gap that remains fairly constant over time. In other words  the higher the returns of the largest endowments are not are not due primarily to risk taking but to a more sophisticated strategy that consistently produces better results.

How can these facts be explained? By the economies of scale in portfolio management. Concretely, Harvard currently spends nearly $100 million a year to manage its endowment. Thus munificent sum goes to pay a team of top-notch portfolio managers capable of identifying the best investment opportunities around the world. But given the size of Harvard’s endowment (around $30 billion), $100 million in management costs is just over 0.3 percent per year. If paying that amount makes it possible to obtain an annual return of 10 percent rather than 5, it is obviously a very good deal. On the other hand, a university with an endowment of only $1 billion (which is never-the-less substantial) could not afford to pay $100 million a year – 10 percent of its portfolio – in management costs. In practice no university pays more than 1% for portfolio management, and most pay less than 0.5, so to manage assets worth $1 billion, one would pay $5 million, which is not enough to pay the specialists in alternative investments that one can hire with $100 million.

As for North Iowa Community College, with an endowment of $11.5 million, even 1 percent a year would amount to only $115,000, which is just enough to pay a half-time or even quarter-time financial advisor at going market rates. Of course a US citizen at the median of the wealth distribution has only $100,000 to invest, so he must be his own money manager and probably has to rely on advice from his brother-in-law. To be sure, financial advisors are not infallible (to say the least), but their ability to identify more profitable investments ( or get access to them) is the main reason why the largest endowments obtain the highest returns.

These results are striking, because they illustrate in a particularly clear and concrete way how large initial endowments can give rise to better returns and thus to substantial inequalities in returns on capital. These high returns largely account for the prosperity of the most prestigious US universities. It is not alumni gifts, which constitute a much smaller flow: just one-tenth to one-fifth of the annual return on endowment. .  . . . (*see first three comments)

In all countries, on all continents, one of the main objectives of public spending on education is to promote social mobility. The stated goal is to provide access to everyone regardless of social origin. To what extent do existing institutions fulfill this objective?

In Part Three, I showed that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease. Qualification levels shifted upwards: a high school diploma now represents what a grade school certificate used to mean, a college degree what a high school diploma used to stand for, and so on. As technologies and workplace needs changed, all wages levels increased at similar rates, so that inequality did not change. What about mobility? Did mass education lead to more rapid turnover of winners and losers for a given skill hierarchy? According to available data, the answer seems to be no: the intergenerational correlation of education and earned incomes, which measures the reproduction of the skill hierarchy over time, shows no trend toward greater mobility over the long run, and in recent years mobility may even have decreased, understanding that sources available for estimating the historical evolution of mobility are highly imperfect. The most firmly established result in this area of research is that intergenerational reproduction is lowest in the Nordic countries and highest in the United States (with a correlation coefficient two-thirds higher than in Sweden). France, Germany, and Britain occupy a middle ground, less mobile than northern Europe but more mobile than in the United States.

These findings stand in sharp contrast to the belief in “American exceptionalism” that once dominated US sociology, according to which social mobility in the United States was exceptionally high compared with the class-bound societies of Europe. No doubt the settler society of the early nineteenth century was more mobile. As I have shown, moreover, inherited wealth played a smaller role in the US than in Europe, and the US wealth was for a long time less concentrated, at least up to World War I. Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, and still today, the available data suggest that social mobility has been and remains lower in the United States than in Europe.

One possible explanation for this is the fact that access to the most elite US universities requires the payment of extremely high tuition fees. Furthermore, thesev fees rose sharply in then period 1990-2010, following fairly closely the increase in the top US incomes, which suggests that the reduced social mobility in the past will decline even more in the future. Research has shown that the proportion of college degrees earned by children whose parents belong to the bottom two quartiles of the income hierarchy stagnated at 10-20 percent in 1970-2010, while it rose from 40 to 80 percent for children in the top quartile. In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access.

This inequality of access also seems to exist at the top of the economic hierarchy, not only because of the high cost of attending the most prestigious private universities (high even in relation to the income of upper-middle-class parents) but also because admissions decisions clearly depend in significant ways on the parents financial capacity to make donations to the universities. For example, one study has shown that gifts by graduates to their former universities are strangely concentrated in the period when the children are of college age. By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2% of the US income hierarchy. Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.

It would be naïve to think that free higher education would resolve the problem. In 1964, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron analyzed more subtle mechanisms of social and cultural selection, which often do the same work as financial selection. In practice, the French system of “grandes escoles” leads to spending more public money on students from more advantaged social backgrounds, while less money is spent on university students who come from more modest backgrounds. Again, the contrast between the official discourse of “republican meritocracy’ and the reality (in which social spending amplifies inequalities of social origin) is extreme. According to the available data, it seems that the average income of parents of students at Sciences Po is currently around 90,000 euros, which roughly corresponds to the top 10 percent of the French income hierarchy. Recruitment is thus 5 time broader than at Harvard but still relatively limited. We lack the data to do a similar calculation for students at other grandes ecoles, but the results would likely be similar.

Make no mistake: there is no easy way to achieve real equality of opportunity in higher education. Tuition fees create an unacceptable inequality of access, but they foster the independence, prosperity, and energy that make US universities the envy of the world. In abstract, it should be possible to combine the advantages of decentralization with hose of equal access by providing universities with substantial publically financed incentives. In some respects this is what public health insurance systems do: producers (doctors and hospitals) are granted a certain independence, but the cost of care is a collective responsibility, this ensuring that patients have equal access to the system. One could do the same thing with universities and students. The Nordic countries have adopted a strategy of this kind in higher education. This of course requires substantial public financing, which is not easy to come by in the current climate of consolidation of the social state. Such a strategy is nevertheless far more satisfactory than other recent attempts, which range from charging tuition fees that vary with parent’s income to offering loans that are to be paid back by a surtax Added to the recipient’s income tax.

If we are to make progress on these issues in the future, it would be good to begin by working towards greater transparency than exists today. In  the United States, France, and most other countries, talk about the virtues of the national meritocratic model is seldom based on a close examination of the facts. Often the purpose is to justify existing inequalities while ignoring the sometimes patent failures of the current system.

In 1872, Emile Boutmy created Sciences Po with a clear mission in mind: “obliged to submit to the rule of the majority, the classes that call themselves the upper classes can preserve their political hegemony only by invoking the rights of the most capable. As traditional upper-class prerogatives crumble, the wave of democracy will encounter a second rampart, built on eminently useful talents, superiority that commands prestige, and abilities of which society cannot sanely deprive itself.”

If we take this incredible statement seriously, what it clearly means is that the upper classes instinctively abandon idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned. One can of course chalk this up to the political context: the Paris Commune has just been put down, and universal  male suffrage had just been establish. Yet Boutmy’s statement has the virtue of reminding us of an essential truth: defining the meaning of equality and justifying the position of the winners is a matter of vital importance, and one can expect to see all sorts of misrepresentation of the facts in the service of the cause.