Peter Gumbel on French Elitism

Énarques and Les X have come up before in posts here relating to France’s elite. So as soon as it became available last month I bought Peter Gumbel’s France’s Got Talent: The Woeful Consequences of French Elitism to read on Kindle. It had appeared in France in print as Élite Academy: Enquête sur la France malade de ses grandes écoles. Gumbel arrived in Paris in 2002 as a correspondent for TIME and began teaching at Sciences Po in 2005. Eventually he was appointed Director of Communications by the Director, Richard Descoings, who died suddenly in New York in 2012 at the age of 53. To describe Descoings’ regime at Sciences Po as controversial would probably be an understatement and for many French readers part of the interest of Gumbel’s book will be its outsider-on-the-inside’s view of Descoings and his wife Nadia Marik and the way things were run.  

Gumbel could have arranged his material more carefully to help readers unfamiliar with the anatomy of France’s elite and the grandes écoles where they are trained. The latter are introduced as:

… the most prestigious grandes écoles, especially the École Polytechnique, for science, or the École Normale Supérieure, for humanities …(location 84)

And then Sciences Po appears without description at the funeral of:

… the director of Sciences Po, who had been found dead …(location 102)

We learn a little later about ENA because Descoing:

… sat the competitive entrance exam for the École nationale d’administration (ENA) not once but three time before he succeeded. (location 129)

But it's more complicated::

… the typical French system of grandes écoles to which just 5% of young people are admitted. Even in this highly selective universe there is a strict hierarchy. Two institutions dominate: the École Polytechnique, known to insiders by the initial X, which was founded in 1794, and ENA, founded in 1945. Together the graduates of these two schools – 400 from X and 80 from ENA every year – represent just 0.057% of their age group, a proportion so miniscule it could be a statistical error. Yet they dominate the top echelons of French business and politics to an astonishing degree. (location 271)

Shortly afterwards we learn that the graduates of ENA are known as énarques (location 296). But what has happened to the École Normale Supérieure, and where does Sciences Po fit in? Gumbel makes a good case that the French system of selecting and training a small elite who then run everything is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Partly because its entry is more about exclusivity than merit:

Just as most énarques went through Sciences Po, …

Ah!

… so it is that the overwhelming majority of students at École Polytechnique went to just five classes préparatoires – two-year cram schools that prepare for the grandes écoles and are an ultra-selective alternative to a regular university. Three of them are in the 5th and 6th arrondissements of Paris, the lycées Henri-IV, Louis-le-Grand and Saint-Louis, and the other two, the lycées Hoche and Saint-Genevieve (better known as “Ginette”), are in Versailles. Every year, Ginette alone sends more than 80 students to Polytechnique, out of the 400 who are accepted. By comparison in Britain, students from the top 100 schools only make up one third of those who get into Oxbridge. (location 365)

So whose children get access to these exclusive prépas?

… children from well-off families still account for almost 70% of registered students at Sciences Po, and the proportion of students whose parents are managers or work in an “intellectually superior” profession actually increased between 2005 and 2011. (location 1883)

Their choice of bac subjects, by the way, will be influenced by the coefs (coefficients, weightings in the overall score) which they carry. Difficult subjects like maths and the dreaded philo have the highest. The only UK equivalent I’m aware of is Cambridge University’s list of “suitable” A levels. The dominance and self-perpetuation of this Parisian elite would be no surprise to Charles Murray whose analysis of diminishing social mobility in the USA, I posted about last year.

In due course, for some lucky énarques and Les X (as polytechniciens are known but Gumbel omits to say), glittering prizes await:

… the VIP treatment accorded to the alumni of these two schools after they have graduated. For the 15 ENA graduates and the 60 or so polytechniciens who come top of their year, the reward is membership of the grands corps d’État (grand state corps) – the Conseil d’État, the Cour des comptes and the Inspection générale des finances (the General Inspectorate of Finance – or of the exclusive technical corps, especially the Corps des mines, the mining corps. Those who join these corps are given entry-level jobs that are already very lofty, and their careers thereafter are fast-tracked. This world of the professional corps, with its entrenched system of privilege, simply doesn’t exist in other countries. (location 402)

Things are changing:

… thirty years ago, about 200 of the 320 graduates joined one of the prestigious state technical corps, in the first place the Corps des mines or the Corps des Ponts et Chausées. Today the total number of French students is up to 400 while those joining a corps has dropped to about 60-70. (location 1843)

Largely because they go on to private sector jobs instead. By the way, as explained here last August, the corps des ingénieurs des ponts et chaussées has become the corps des ingénieurs des ponts, des eaux et des forêts, and also the corps des mines covers a much wider range of technology than mining nowadays.

The main thrust of Gumbel’s book, to which he devotes a whole Chapter (6 – The Small World Phenomenon) is that, however well this institutionalised elitism may have served France in the past, it is increasingly inappropriate and he cites various analyses and numerous statistics to support his view. He goes on to describe some of the changes that are needed, particularly in the grandes écoles and some of the reforms that are already in place. His final warning is:

That the most powerful elites can be brought down if they fail to adjust to a changing world. That arrogance and defiance won’t guarantee longevity, or even courage. That even the cream can turn rancid. (location 2227)

I’m not sure that Gumbel, who taught journalism at Sciences Po is as au fait with the École Polytechnique, the technical corps and ParisTech as he is with the world of the social sciences. About 15 years ago I got to know some young French corps members who had spent time at MIT and Caltech on Master’s degrees, a recent development in Sciences Po apparently. As to whether the following is a bad thing:

The election of President Hollande in May 2012 sparked days of scrambling as the ministerial cabinets started to be constituted. One friend was in the thick of it, juggling calls from hundreds of people who were pitching their candidacy. The most striking, he recalls, was the call that came from the Corps des Mines. The message was “this is the name of the technical adviser for your cabinet”. There was no discussion of who this person was and whether he would be suitable for the post. (location 429)

Well, the iron grip of the technical corps would never allow France to get into the situation of the USA with its 70,000 structurally deficient bridges. Again, it is EDF Energy, majority-owned by the French government, that the UK is having to negotiate with for the construction of new nuclear power stations. According to the Financial Times (£):

… [HM] Treasury offered EDF a strike price of £80 per megawatt hour, while EDF had been holding out for a price of just below £100/MWh, about twice the current wholesale price of power. People close to the negotiations say a potential compromise would lie somewhere in the middle. It is understood that EDF could be encouraged to settle for a lower strike price if the government underwrote some elements of the project. This would reduce the amount of capital invested on which EDF earned a 10 per cent return, but would remove some risk from its balance sheet.

which doesn’t make the UK position sound too clever. (A MWh is 1000 kilowatt/hours which cost you and me about £130 at present).

Anyone who is at all interested in understanding the way France is run (or is negotiating MWh with EDF) should download a copy of France’s Got Talent. Peter Gumbel has done a great service in making his insider’s view available to other English-speakers – the French version will hopefully be a timely contribution to debate among les citoyennes as well.

NOTES: As usual I have put French words in italics in my text; Gumbel doesn’t, so not in the quotations from his (but elite and corps are no longer French words, I think). A Kindle download is an awkward thing to use for any serious purpose, it seems to me, by comparison with hard copy. The locations are as a consequence approximate, but should take readers to the relevant passage.

Reversion to the mean and social mobility

In her FT Money investment advice column on 7 July, Merryn Somerset Webb returned to a favourite subject. She had been looking at a report by Mark Urquhart from Baillie Gifford:

According to him, the four most dangerous words in investment are not, as most of us think: “this time, it’s different.” They are: “reversion to the mean”.  

… we are living in a period of exceptionally rapid change – change that can have a “profound effects on equities”. Take the way Urquhart satisfied himself with the definition of reversion to the mean. He looked it up on Wikipedia [my link], a website now accessed by 15 per cent of internet users every day, and viewed by pretty much everyone as the starting point for researching anything. Just 12 years ago, Wikipedia didn’t exist.  

… Set too much store by reversion to the mean and you will be “routinely tempted to sell out of long term winners and into clunkers . . . this is not an obvious winning investment strategy”.

And on this basis, and probably wisely, she advised against buying shares in banks just because they appear historically cheap. The same statistical phenomenon (under its alternative name of regression to the mean) had come up in another journalist’s article a month earlier but in a different context. In the Daily Telegraph on 9 June Damian Thompson, impressed by Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, reported:

A hundred years ago, says Murray, most Americans in the top five per cent of cognitive ability had ordinary occupations. They were very clever shopkeepers, farmers, housewives and factory workers. But they didn’t somersault over their peers. One reason is that they couldn’t marry very smart people. High intelligence was scattered evenly across America, so a gifted farm worker might have to travel 100 miles before he met a woman as bright as he was. Instead, he married an ordinary local girl, and their children, regressing to the mean, were only slightly cleverer than their schoolfriends. The explosion of college education changed that. Universities plucked bright kids out of their home towns like a tornado and suddenly they found that they weren’t in Kansas any more. Young people hooked up with equally intelligent partners and passed on two sets of smart genes.

Read carelessly this might leave the impression that the “gifted” farm worker’s intelligence when diluted by that of the “ordinary” local girl had been nulled to the average whereas “bright kids” nowadays find “equally intelligent” partners” and so can “pass on “two sets of smart genes”, undiluted as it were. Thompson is no doubt well aware that we all get not two, but only the one set of genes which combine the traits we inherit from our parents. But more interesting is what Murray actually said in trying to explain the emergence of a new upper class in white America. This is a class based on high educational attainment providing access to the most elite and well-rewarded forms of employment as “mind workers” or “symbolic analysts”. He defines it as:

… the most successful 5 percent of adults ages 25 or over who are working in managerial positions, in the professions (medicine, the law, engineering and architecture, the sciences and university faculty) and in content-production jobs in the media. (page 20)

His first proposition is that high cognitive ability is a prerequisite for such employment although success depends on other factors such as motivation and interpersonal skills. But don’t be misled by the fact that:

… the correlation of IQ scores with performance among those people who are attorneys, screenwriters and biochemists is modest. [But] to be a top attorney, screenwriter or biochemist, you have to be very smart in the ways that IQ tests measure. (page 47)

Murray calls the point that Thompson picked up, about parents now being more likely to be equally intelligent, “the increase in cognitive homogamy”. However, this does not eliminate regression to the mean and he argues that:

… the expected value of the IQ of a grown-up offspring is 40 percent toward the population mean from the parents’ midpoint IQ (page 65)

He takes the IQ levels associated with levels of educational attainment:

and then casts the expected IQ of the child in terms of the parents education:

followed by a very significant passage:

These represent important differences in the resources that members of the next generation take to the preservation of their legacy. Consider first a college graduate who marries a high school graduate, each with the average cognitive ability for their educational level (113 and 99, respectively). Their expected midpoint IQ is 106. Suppose they have built a small business, been highly successful, and leave $5 million to their son. If their son has the expected IQ of a little less than 105, he will have only about a 50 percent chance of completing college even assuming that he tries to go to college. Maybe he inherited extraordinary energy and determination from his parents, which would help, but those qualities regress to the mean as well. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations is a likely scenario for the progeny of that successful example. Compare that situation with the one facing th  e son of two parents who both graduated from elite schools. If he has exactly the expected IQ of l2l, he has more than an 80 percent chance of getting a degree if he goes to college. These percentages are not a matter of statistical theory. They are based on the empirical experience of both the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth [NLSY] - if you had an IQ of 105 or one of 121 and entered college, those are the probabilities that you ever got a degree.  

In addition to those differing chances of graduation are qualitative differences between young people with IQs of 105 and 121. First, the reasons that someone with an IQ of 105 doesn't finish college probably include serious academic difficulties with the work, whereas the reasons a person with an IQ of 121 doesn't finish college almost certainly involve motivation or self-discipline-no one with an IQ of 121 has to drop out of college because he can't pass the courses. Second, there is a qualitative difference in the range of occupations open to those two young persons. The one with an accurately measured IQ of 105 cannot expect to be successful in any of the prestigious professions that are screened for IQ by their educational requirements (e.g., medicine, law, engineering, academia). It is unlikely that he can even complete those educational requirements. Someone with an accurately measured IQ of 121 can succeed in any of them if his mathematical and verbal talents are both strong, or succeed in the ones geared to his talents if there is an imbalance between mathematical and verbal ability.  

Now think in terms of an entire cohort of children. Where will the next generation of children with exceptional cognitive ability come from? For purposes of illustration, let's say that "exceptionally high cognitive ability" means the top five centiles of the next generation of white children. More than a quarter of their parents may be expected to have a midpoint IQ of more than 125. Another quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of I17 - 125. The third quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of 108 - 117. That leaves one quarter who will be the children of parents with midpoint parental IQ of less than 108. Only about 14 percent of that top five centiles of children are expected to come from the entire bottom half of the distribution of white parents.   

Therein lies the explanation for that startling statistic I reported earlier about SAT scores: In 2010, 87 percent of the students with 700-plus scores in Critical Reading or Mathematics had a parent with a college degree, and 57 percent had a parent with a graduate degree. Those percentages could have been predicted pretty closely just by knowing the facts about the IQs associated with different educational levels and the correlation between parental and child IQ. They could have been predicted without making any theoretical assumptions about the roles of nature and nurture in transmitting cognitive ability and without knowing anything about the family incomes of those SAT test-takers, how many test preparation courses their children took, whether they went to private schools, or how ingenious the educational toys in the household were when they were toddlers.  

In an age when the majority of parents in the top five centiles of cognitive ability worked as farmers, shopkeepers, blue-collar workers, and housewives-a situation that necessarily prevailed a century ago, given the occupational and educational distributions during the early 1900s - these relationships between the cognitive ability of parents and children had no ominous implications. Today, when the exceptionally qualified have been so efficiently drawn into the ranks of the upper-middle class, and when they are so often married to people with the same ability and background, they do. In fact, the implications are even more ominous than I just described because none of the numbers I used to illustrate the transmission of cognitive ability to the next generation incorporated the effects of the increased educational homogamy of recent decades. In any case, the bottom line is not subject to refutation: Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the upper-middle class, and more specifically from parents who are already part of the broad elite. (pages 66-68, my emphasis)

This line of argument does not align well with much of the current political rhetoric in the UK about social mobility. However, it seems quite likely that the UK will experience the same trend towards cognitive homogamy. It may be less marked than in the US where there has been a clear elite grouping of universities since the 1960s using a standard set of admission tests, the SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Tests). But, as posted here before, there are well-known rankings of British universities and, very recently, there is increasing use of admission tests to supplement A-level results.  Again, the existence in the UK of elite grammar schools and independent schools pupils concentrate on the academic A-levels appropriate for the best universities may cloud any comparison with the US.

A technical point which intrigues me is that if the offspring of the two 135 IQ parents have an expected IQ of 121, that will be the mean IQ of the children of such parents. What is the nature of the statistical distribution of the offspring’s IQ? Is it, like IQ in the population as a whole, normally distributed (the “bell-curve”, see below) or skewed in some way? If it is a normal distribution, what is the standard deviation (SD)? In my experience, sometimes the children of such parents are just as clever as their parents (if not more). But if symmetry applies, others must be as far below 121 as 135 is above ie 107.  Again, experience, which is not of course the same as objective statistics, leads me to doubt it.

Although it is primarily about the US, I hope to come back to another aspect of Murray’s book in a future post. I would certainly urge anyone interested in British society to read it for the insights it provides into how things could develop here.

Social Mobility and the Conscience of the Rich

Most of us do not make considerable fortunes – so who are we to criticise those who do or how they choose to spend their largesse? If rich men want to buy Picassos and lend them to the Tate, surely it’s up to them? Of course, there is a long history of charitable donations by the wealthy from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, and recently two Britons who made fortunes in the financial services boom have set up charitable foundations to examine issues relating to social mobility.

The Sutton Trust was founded in 1997 by Sir Peter Lampl after a career in private equity in the US. “The main objective of the Sutton Trust is to improve educational opportunities for young people from non-privileged backgrounds and increase social mobility”. Clive Cowdery, who made a fortune in the insurance industry, in 2005 set up the Resolution Foundation, “an independent, not-for-profit research and policy organisation dedicated to improving the well-being of low-to-middle earners (LMEs) in today’s mixed economy”.

The Trust and the Foundation are registered charities with a similar modus operandi. The Sutton Trust sees itself as:

a 'do-tank' which not only undertakes research and advocates policy change, but also funds, develops and tests innovative practical solutions to educational inequality. The Trust is now focusing on research and policy work.

The Resolution Foundation undertakes:

original research and economic analysis to understand the challenges facing LMEs today. We develop practical and effective policy proposals to tackle the issues we identify, and we engage with policy makers and other key stakeholders to influence decision making and bring about change.

Both organisations employ “bright young things” to get the work done, “clever old things” as trustees, and are chaired by their founders. Both get frequent media coverage of their activities, the longer established Sutton Trust probably being better-known, but the Resolution Foundation recently sponsored a high-profile event with Ed Miliband as a speaker. Both undertake research relating to social mobility, the Sutton Trust, because of its interest in the inherently long-term benefits of education, tends to look at inter-generational issues. Resolution has recently published a report, “Moving on up? Social mobility in the 1990s and 2000s”. It compared how intra-generationally mobile people a group of people in their 30s had been in the 1990s with another younger group’s experience in their 30s during the 2000s.

The Resolution report received good press coverage, eg in the Financial Times on 11 March 2011 under the headline “Social mobility ‘increased 22% during 2000s’”:

Social mobility – at least as measured by earnings – increased during the past decade, according to a study that challenges the widely held view that social mobility is static or even in decline. Research focused on the earnings of people now in their thirties and early forties shows the chances of making a significant move up or down the earnings ladder remain pretty low.
But the work, by the Resolution Foundation, calculates there was a 22 per cent increase in the probability of moving significantly up the earnings distribution table in the 2000s compared with the 1990s. Back then, less than 3 per cent of people who started the decade in the bottom 20 per cent of earnings made it into the top 20 per cent by the end of the decade. In the 2000s that percentage remained low but had almost doubled to nearly 6 per cent.

Social mobility is a politically-loaded topic. Comparisons between the 1990s and the 2000s are to a large extent between the periods of Conservative and New Labour government, so evidence of improved social mobility after 2000 reflects well on Labour. Not that any party wants to neglect the issue. The Coalition Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, gave a speech on social mobility in August 2010 in which he said “our long-term social policy goal is social mobility” (though this was primarily directed at inter-generational mobility). It wasn’t surprising, then, that two members of the UK twitterati with long political antennae, Paul Waugh and John Rentoul, picked up on reports of the Resolution study, asking “What does this mean for the Coalition's narrative?” and “What does this mean for the media narrative?”, respectively. This post attempts to answer their questions – and fails.

The devil always lies in the detail, so the starting point in coming up with an answer was the Resolution report, in particular Section 3, which explains that the data for the older group came from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and for the younger group from the British Cohort Study (BCS). NCDS attempts to follow through their lives all the people born in one week in England, Scotland and Wales in 1958. The second has aimed to follow all the children in England, Scotland and Wales born in one week in 1970. Among the data collected by NCDS and BCS from the individuals who make up these “cohorts” has been information about incomes. This provided the basis of the Resolution study which used changes in earnings as the measure of mobility. Table 1 of the report (page 9, reproduced below) summarises the data sets that were used.

It is important at this point to realise that “Sample size” here refers to the number of individuals whose data was selected by Resolution from the respective NCDS and BCS cohorts. How and why this was done is explained in Appendix A and attention should be paid to Tables A1 and A2. In essence, individuals who had negative or zero earnings and individuals who were self-employed (“due to the unreliability of earnings data for that group”) were excluded.

Using the data in Table A1 it is possible to reconstruct the “Economic Activity” of the total NCDS cohort of 11469 (apparently) individual and compare it with that of the 5903 in the Resolution sample:

Again, the effect of the exclusion applied to produce the Resolution sample from the total NCDS cohort can be seen in the “Social Class” percentages:

Something similar happens with the BCS-derived sample:

Appendix A recognises the apparent over-representation of the higher social classes, particularly in the BCS sample, but goes on to argue:

To test the effect of this on our findings of mobility we re-ran the regression of log earnings found in Table A5 of the Appendix B but with respondents from the managerial and skilled manual social classes excluded from both cohorts. The results are shown in Table A3 and are purely indicative as exclusion of the managerial and skilled manual classes removes 57 percent of respondents from the NCDS sample and 65 percent from the BCS sample. Using these reduced samples, mobility is still significantly higher among the 2000s BCS cohort than the 1990s NCDS cohort. However, we acknowledge that the increased probability of inclusion in the BCS cohort due to respondents being a member of the managerial or skilled manual classes may have increased the overall estimate, but not reduced its significance.

The Resolution report then says:

Another point to note is that the rate of exclusion overall is much higher in the BCS cohort where the excluded sample contained 2,105 more respondents than the final research sample. In comparison, the NCDS excluded sample contained 337 fewer respondents than the final research sample.

This is more easily understood by reference to the table below:

The report then states:

The reason for this is likely to be the data collection methodology of the 2008 BCS survey which used a telephone interview rather than the face-to-face interview used in other NCDS and BCS surveys. Telephone interviews tend to have lower response rates than face-to-face interviews and overall attrition between the start and end points of the BCS survey (2000 and 2008) used in this research was higher than between the start and end points of the NCDS survey (1991 and 2000).

To understand the expression “start and end points” it is helpful to look at the website of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS, part of the University of London’s Institute of Education). Their NCDS page explains that the NCDS cohort (considered to be 16240 individuals) was surveyed in 1991 and 1999/2000 at the ages of 33 and 42 (cf Table 1 quoted above) and that samples of 11407 and 11419 (about 70%) were achieved. Neither of these figures is exactly the 11469 Resolution figure, but not far off, and there certainly wasn’t any “attrition” between the two surveys.

The Centre’s BCS pages are more problematic. They confirm the Resolution figure of 11261 30-year olds (out of a target 16068, again 70%) surveyed in 1999/2000 (Table 1 again) but provide little data about the 2008 telephone survey, although “the dataset will be available from the UK Data Archive in September 2010”. It turns out that the National Centre for Social Research (NCSR) was contracted by CLS to undertake the 2008 survey, and their Technical Report is available. This reveals that the intention was to survey 11843 of the BCS cohort as selected by CLS and that 8874 telephone interviews were achieved (75%) by NCSR. However, how many of these 8874 were excluded by Resolution as being self-employed or without income is not clear. If 40 % were excluded, as was the case for the 1999/2000 BCS dataset, that would have given a sample of about 3600 individuals. However, this would not be consistent with the statement in Section 3 of the report: “The size of the cohort samples which are above 4,500 in both [NCDS and BCS] cases”.

Not being a social scientist (probably apparent in previous posts about IEA and IPPR) I accept that I lack a proper appreciation of the difficulties such work presents in terms of data. Having acquired the earnings numbers, Resolution, I’m sure, crunched them competently to produce the tabulations of transitions and estimates of mobility. I wonder, however, about the errors in the data that might derive from the exclusions made by Resolution from both the NCDS and BCS datasets. Also, it is not clear how Resolution treated the much smaller 2008 BCS dataset. Its reduced size was not exactly due to “attrition” (a problem which develops over time with all longitudinal surveys) but to a change in methodology. Is it possible that moving to a telephone survey introduced a bias towards individuals with higher earnings?  Anyway, putting it crudely, the report seems to show that in the 1990s, when incomes generally were rising, the NCDS group were all getting better off with small relative changes (all boats rising with the tide) ie there was high absolute mobility.  In the 2000s, a period of largely stagnant incomes, the younger group experienced bigger relative changes (snakes and ladders).  The characteristics of the winners and losers in relative terms is going to be the subject of future Resolution research.    
So, to return to the Waugh/Rentoul questions – I don’t think I can help! Apart from pointing out that the government is more interested in inter-generational than the intra-generational mobility which Resolution was attempting to address.

What should rich men with a conscience, and a broader interest in society than making money out of it, do with their money? Of course it’s up to them if they want to set up think tanks to investigate hobby-horse issues. (Personally I would want to emulate Bryan Ferry and collect modern British art!) I do wonder, though, whether mainstream politics, where the full breadth of social issues and claims on public money have to be addressed, might be a better outlet for these undoubtedly clever and energetic individuals (quite a few of the current Cabinet seem to have made a pile). It seems undemocratic to me that certain single issues can gain more attention than they deserve, by comparison with others which don’t happen to be rich men’s fancies.