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At Stanford more than elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for the better

Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by their students or colleagues. There are probably more faculty millionaires at Stanford than at any other university in the world.

In his twelve years as president, Stanford’s endowment has grown to nearly seventeen billion dollars. In each of the past seven years, Stanford has raised more money than any other American university.

But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune.

A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent.

many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”

Stanford is not the only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others, does, too. But Kelley’s effort is widely believed to be the most audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health and wellness; and K-12 education.

Feeling dejected or unhappy in a place like Stanford causes one to feel abnormal and out-of-place, so we may tend to internalize and brood over this lack of happiness instead of productively addressing the situatio

his principal academic legacy may be the growth of what’s called “interdisciplinary education.” This is the philosophy now promoted at the various schools at Stanford—engineering, business, medicine, science, design—which encourages students from diverse majors to come together to solve real or abstract problems. The goal is to have them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise. “Ten years ago, ‘interdisciplinary’ was a code word for something soft,” Jeff Koseff says. “John changed that.”

Among the bolder initiatives to create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the mechanical-engineering department.

Distance learning threatens one day to disrupt higher education by reducing the cost of college and by offering the convenience of a stay-at-home, do-it-on-your-own-time education. “Part of our challenge is that right now we have more questions than we have answers,” Hennessy says, of online education. “We know this is going to be important and, in the long term, transformative to education. We don’t really understand how yet.”

financial aid has produced a campus of diverse students who are unburdened by student debt—and who thus don’t have to spend the first five years of their career earning as much money as they can.

“The kinds of project we put in front of our students don’t have right and wrong answers,” Greenberg says. “They have good, better, and really, really better.”

he was impressed by “the bias toward action” at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy, committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the Post, “diversity” was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different.

Byers has kept in touch with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as “quiet and quite humble,” by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students.

The United States has “two types of college education that are in conflict with each other,” he said. One is “the classic liberal-arts model—four years of relative tranquility in which students are free to roam through disciplines, great thoughts, and great works with endless options and not much of a rationale.” The second is more utilitarian: “A college degree is expected to lead to a job, or at least to admission to a graduate or professional school.” The best colleges divide the first two years into introductory courses and the last two into the study of a major, all the while trying to expose students to “a broad range of disciplines and modes of thought.” Students, he declared, are not broadly educated, not sufficiently challenged to “search to know.” Instead, universities ask them to serve “the public, to work directly on solutions in a multidisciplinary way.” The danger, he went on, is “that academic researchers will not only embrace particular solutions but will fight for them in the political arena.” A university should keep to “its most fundamental purpose,” which is “the disinterested pursuit of truth.

Stanford, along with its peers, is now justifying its existence mostly in terms of what it can do for humanity and improve the world,” he answered. “I am concerned that a research-intense university will become too result-oriented,” a development that risks politicizing the university. And it also risks draining more resources from liberal arts

students spent too much time networking and strategizing and becoming “slaves to the dictates of a hoped-for future,” and too little time being spontaneous. “Stanford students are superb consequentialists—that is, we tend to measure the goodness of actions by their eventual results,

We excel at making rational calculations of expected returns to labor and investment, which is probably why so many of us will take the exhortation to occupy Wall Street quite literally after graduation. So before making any decision, we ask one, very simple question: What will I get out of it?”

“At most great universities, humanities feel like stepchildren,”

The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the different spheres of their experience.

Instead of erecting buildings, Andreessen says, Stanford should invest even more of its resources in distance learning: “We’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to every single kid around the world. And the idea that we were going to build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to me, tragically undershooting our potential.”

In late January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor, consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from thirteen departments, including engineering, political science, business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter, and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children. Another was to design a bicycle-storage system.

The “key question,” he says, is: “How can we increase efficiency without decreasing quality?”

online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford. Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more efficiency is synonymous with a better education.

Give me a real crisis with enough urgency to invest the parties with ownership, set up a credible process, find a mediator with will and skill, add a little luck, and poof, you too can have a chance at an agreement. Less is more here. Toward that end, here are a half dozen rules of the road on when and how negotiations actually work.

Own up: Former World Bank and Harvard President Larry Summers was right. In the history of the world nobody ever washed a rental car. People really care only about what they own. And without those in conflict actually investing themselves in the need for an agreement, there won’t be one.

Another Fisher principle was to develop objective criteria so that when there was disagreement, there would be some reasonable baseline to resolve them

Nobody Gets 100%: The Rolling Stones got this one right: You get what you need, not always what you want. To do a deal that lasts requires a balance of interests where both leaders can convince themselves they got enough on the substance—and persuade their publics too. A third party mediator can often help to make the sale by being creative in packaging. But the substance has to be real.

A Credible Process: The so-called peace process—now in a coma—has gotten a bad name. And it’s easy to see why. But if you want to reach an agreement, you’ll need a process that’s credible all the same. Negotiations on complex issues involving identity, religion, security take time. Expectations need to be managed. And there must be a sense that the process—however difficult—is heading toward mutually agreeable goals.

The 3rd Party: It would be nice to fantasize that the Arabs and Israelis could do this peace thing without the help of a third party, but history says no. Sure, the two sides often start the process. But the gaps are too wide, the mistrust too deep, and the need for assurances—economic, technical and security assistance—too great to go it alone.

put down those academic books. Get yourself to the nearest video store and rent West Side Story and the Godfather. That’s what real world negotiations look like.

The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.

Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism.

Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.

The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.

Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time.

Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.

By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.

it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.

The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.

the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success

The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.

Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.

while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.

We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense.

That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.

Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.

Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children.

In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.

Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment.

The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age

Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.

At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control.

success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies

Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to

Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”

It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.

But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating

Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.

Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts

The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched.

Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.

THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.

The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit.

It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.

research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children.

The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.

But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification.

the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.

s a homeschooled teenager, without grades or teachers, I learned to love knowledge for its own sake, and, just as importantly to trust in my ability to attain it.

“Even students who are successful, getting straight A's, the highest accolades, by being students in school have fear and anxiety about maintaining these types of grades. You don't really get a sense of who you are, what your interests are, what your passions are [but are] being filled by other people's idea of what it means to be a human being.” As a typically neurotic straight-A student at a New York private school, I'd internalized the idea of education as a means to an end.

When I returned to traditional education as a high-school freshman at a New England boarding school known for its rigor and expectations of independence, I found myself surprisingly well-prepared for its demands. I knew how to manage my time effectively, how to approach the hours of homework as an opportunity to learn rather than a chore to be cleared away. I knew, too, how to defend my academic arguments, to not back down simply because another student disagreed with me about the causes of the American Civil War. In the absence of external signifiers of success, I had learned how to measure my own.

Coleman and his team are completing a major revision of the SAT to be unveiled in January 2014 and launched in the spring of 2015. He wants the test to “propel” students toward deeper learning of real things

That means fewer abstruse vocabulary words (like “abstruse”) and essays that are based on documents so human graders can evaluate the correctness of their writers’ arguments, not just their style.

The U.S. rode to economic supremacy with the world’s highest share of young college grads, but now its percentage of graduates at the typical age of graduation is behind those of Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the U.K., the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says.

The message: Real life is messy. You’re not given five answers to choose from. And America shouldn’t depend on something resembling an IQ test to rake geniuses from the rubbish.

The SAT and its rival, the ACT, are part of the problem. Designed to ferret out hidden talent, the tests have become, for some students at least, barriers to higher education. Scores are highly correlated with family income; Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls the SAT a “wealth test.”

Since the earliest days of the republic, there have been two schools of thought about the merits of sorting students, as recounted in Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Thomas Jefferson, who believed in a “natural aristocracy,” said that in Virginia all w

New Englander Henry Adams was less disdainful of the rubbish. He said Jefferson’s natural aristocracy was no better than regular old aristocracy: “I would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited power.”

The SAT was launched in 1926 as a variant of an intelligence test used in World War I to place soldiers and sailors. Harvard adopted it in 1934.

The University of California long resisted using standardized tests but in 1968—swamped by more qualified applications than it could handle—began requiring applicants to submit SAT scores as a way to screen out lower achievers.

Admissions officers at about 850 four-year colleges now make standardized tests optional for some or all of their applicants

To be less cynical, the tests do stigmatize low scorers and distract people “from what they really need to do, which is mastering academic subjects in their high school,” says Wake Forest University sociologist Joseph Soares, whose school went SAT-optional in 2008.

The elites who went through a profound disillusionment with the Western ways are now occupying key decision-making positions in the Kremlin, state-owned business and media. These people learned most of their survival skills in the 1990s. They know how to operate in a market that is barely regulated. They know how to keep their adversaries guessing. It’s an environment where the levels of trust are low, the levels of uncertainty are high and the rule of law does not mean much.

Cynical pragmatism is the order of the day. President Putin and his circle see gullibility and idealism of any kind as a politician’s main weakness.

members of the generation born in the 1980s who are now beginning to enter elite positions in Russian academic, professional and political life are increasingly suspicious about the global ambitions of the United States. These are President Putin’s minions. So are the thousands of people from both sides of the R

the sheer scale of the Russian propaganda machine effort against the West could not have continued without consequences. The Russian economy grows weaker as tougher sanctions take their toll, investors shun our markets and our brightest people flee the country.

Mr. Putin’s rhetoric has come full circle: Our country has become what he has always warned us was true — a place surrounded by enemies.

Stiglitz has made the case that the rise in inequality in the US, far from being the natural outcome of market forces, has been profoundly shaped by “our policies and our politics,” with disastrous effects on society and the economy as a whole. In a recent report for the Roosevelt Institute called Rewriting the Rules, Stiglitz has laid out a detailed list of reforms that he argues will make it possible to create “an economy that works for everyone.”

his entire career in academia has been devoted to showing how markets cannot always be counted on to produce ideal results. In a series of enormously important papers, for which he would eventually win the Nobel Prize, Stiglitz showed how imperfections and asymmetries of information regularly lead markets to results that do not maximize welfare.

He also argued that this meant, at least in theory, that well-placed government interventions could help correct these market failures

in books like Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) he offered up a stinging critique of the way the US has tried to manage globalization, a critique that made him a cult hero in much of the developing world

Stiglitz has been one of the fiercest critics of the way the Eurozone has handled the Greek debt crisis, arguing that the so-called troika’s ideological commitment to austerity and its opposition to serious debt relief have deepened Greece’s economic woes and raised the prospect that that country could face “depression without end.”

For Stiglitz, the fight over Greece’s future isn’t just about the right policy. It’s also about “ideology and power.

there’s a good case to be made that the sheer amount of rent-seeking in the US economy has expanded over the years. The number of patents is vastly greater than it once was. Copyright terms have gotten longer. Occupational licensing rules (which protect professionals from competition) are far more common. Tepid antitrust enforcement has led to reduced competition in many industries

The Great Divide is somewhat fragmented and repetitive, but it has a clear thesis, namely that inequality in the US is not an unfortunate by-product of a well-functioning economy. Instead, the enormous riches at the top of the income ladder are largely the result of the ability of the one percent to manipulate markets and the political process to their own benefit.

Inequality obviously has no single definition. As Stiglitz writes:There are so many different parts to America’s inequality: the extremes of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, the increase of poverty at the bottom. Each has its own causes, and needs its own remedies.

his preoccupation here is primarily with why the rich today are so much richer than they used to be.

the main reason people at the top are so much richer these days than they once were (and so much richer than everyone else) is not that they own so much more capital: it’s that they get paid much more for their work than they once did, while everyone else gets paid about the same, or less

while incomes at the top have risen in countries around the world, nowhere have they risen faster than in the US.

One oft-heard justification of this phenomenon is that the rich get paid so much more because they are creating so much more value than they once did

as companies have gotten bigger, the potential value that CEOs can add has increased as well, driving their pay higher.

Stiglitz will have none of this. He sees the boom in the incomes of the one percent as largely the result of what economists call “rent-seeking.”

from the perspective of the economy as a whole, rent-seeking is a waste of time and energy. As Stiglitz puts it, the economy suffers when “more efforts go into ‘rent seeking’—getting a larger slice of the country’s economic pie—than into enlarging the size of the pie.”

The work of Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez has been instrumental in documenting the rise of income inequality, not just in the US but around the world. Major economic institutions, like the IMF and the OECD, have published studies arguing that inequality, far from enhancing economic growth, actually damages it. And it’s now easy to find discussions of the subject in academic journals.

. After all, while pretax inequality is a problem in its own right, what’s most destructive is soaring posttax inequality. And it’s posttax inequality that most distinguishes the US from other developed countries

All this rent-seeking, Stiglitz argues, leaves certain industries, like finance and pharmaceuticals, and certain companies within those industries, with an outsized share of the rewards

within those companies, the rewards tend to be concentrated as well, thanks to what Stiglitz calls “abuses of corporate governance that lead CEOs to take a disproportionate share of corporate profits” (another form of rent-seeking)

This isn’t just bad in some abstract sense, Stiglitz suggests. It also hurts society and the economy

It alienates people from the system. And it makes the rich, who are obviously politically influential, less likely to support government investment in public goods (like education and infrastructure) because those goods have little impact on their lives.

More interestingly (and more contentiously), Stiglitz argues that inequality does serious damage to economic growth: the more unequal a country becomes, the slower it’s likely to grow. He argues that inequality hurts demand, because rich people consume less of their incomes. It leads to excessive debt, because people feel the need to borrow to make up for their stagnant incomes and keep up with the Joneses. And it promotes financial instability, as central banks try to make up for stagnant incomes by inflating bubbles, which eventually burst

exactly why inequality is bad for growth turns out to be hard to pin down—different studies often point to different culprits. And when you look at cross-country comparisons, it turns out to be difficult to prove that there’s a direct connection between inequality and the particular negative factors that Stiglitz cites

This doesn’t mean that, as conservative economists once insisted, inequality is good for economic growth. In fact, it’s clear that US-style inequality does not help economies grow faster, and that moving toward more equality will not do any damage

Similarly, Stiglitz’s relentless focus on rent-seeking as an explanation of just why the rich have gotten so much richer makes a messy, complicated problem simpler than it is

When we talk about the one percent, we’re talking about two groups of people above all: corporate executives and what are called “financial professionals” (these include people who work for banks and the like, but also money managers, financial advisers, and so on)

The emblematic figures here are corporate CEOs, whose pay rose 876 percent between 1978 and 2012, and hedge fund managers, some of whom now routinely earn billions of dollars a year

Shareholders, meanwhile, had fewer rights and were less active. Since then, we’ve seen a host of reforms that have given shareholders more power and made boards more diverse and independent. If CEO compensation were primarily the result of bad corporate governance, these changes should have had at least some effect. They haven’t. In fact, CEO pay has continued to rise at a brisk rate

So what’s really going on? Something much simpler: asset managers are just managing much more money than they used to, because there’s much more capital in the markets than there once was

that means that an asset manager today can get paid far better than an asset manager was twenty years ago, even without doing a better job.

there’s no convincing evidence that CEOs are any better, in relative terms, than they once were, and plenty of evidence that they are paid more than they need to be, in view of their performance. Similarly, asset managers haven’t gotten better at beating the market.

More important, probably, has been the rise of ideological assumptions about the indispensability of CEOs, and changes in social norms that made it seem like executives should take whatever they could get.

It actually has important consequences for thinking about how we can best deal with inequality. Strategies for reducing inequality can be generally put into two categories: those that try to improve the pretax distribution of income (this is sometimes called, clunkily, predistribution) and those that use taxes and transfers to change the post-tax distribution of income

he has high hopes that better rules, designed to curb rent-seeking, will have a meaningful impact on the pretax distribution of income. Among other things, he wants much tighter regulation of the financial sector

t it would be surprising if these rules did all that much to shrink the income of much of the one percent, precisely because improvements in corporate governance and asset managers’ transparency are likely to have a limited effect on CEO salaries and money managers’ compensation.

Most importantly, the financial industry is now a much bigger part of the US economy than it was in the 1970s, and for Stiglitz, finance profits are, in large part, the result of what he calls “predatory rent-seeking activities,” including the exploitation of uninformed borrowers and investors, the gaming of regulatory schemes, and the taking of risks for which financial institutions don’t bear the full cost (because the government will bail them out if things go wrong).

The redistributive policies Stiglitz advocates look pretty much like what you’d expect. On the tax front, he wants to raise taxes on the highest earners and on capital gains, institute a carbon tax and a financial transactions tax, and cut corporate subsidies

It’s also about investing. As he puts it, “If we spent more on education, health, and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.” So he wants more investment in schools, infrastructure, and basic research.

The core insight of Stiglitz’s research has been that, left on their own, markets are not perfect, and that smart policy can nudge them in better directions.

Of course, the political challenge in doing any of this (let alone all of it) is immense, in part because inequality makes it harder to fix inequality. And even for progressives, the very familiarity of the tax-and-transfer agenda may make it seem less appealing.

the policies that Stiglitz is calling for are, in their essence, not much different from the policies that shaped the US in the postwar era: high marginal tax rates on the rich and meaningful investment in public infrastructure, education, and technology. Yet there’s a reason people have never stopped pushing for those policies: they worked

It’s true that the Internet and word processors have made it easier for today’s students to write papers and search for references. But because the largest portion of the study time decline happened between 1961 and 1981, before these advances could have been a factor, and because declines also occurred in majors that don’t rely on writing papers or searching the library, we doubt this explains much of the story.

the study time decline is clearly visible both for students who work for pay while in school and for those who don’t.

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.” Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

Ravitch now sees its emphasis on testing and consumer choice as educationally disastrous. “I concluded,” she says, “that curriculum and instruction were far more important than choice and accountability.” And she rejects the rush to privatization and the popular mantra that schools should be run like businesses: “I realized that incentives and sanctions may be right for business . . . where the bottom line — profit — is the highest priority, but they are not right for schools”

“the humanistic aspects of science and social science — the imaginative creative aspect of rigorous critical thought — are . . . losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of . . . applied skills suited to profit-making” (“Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,” 2010). In the brave new world of accountability, the arts and literature will be kicked to the curb “because they don’t look like they lead to personal or national economic achievement.” Indeed, “the ability to think and argue . . . looks to many people like something dispensable if what we want are marketable outputs of a quantifiable nature”

“This is the portion of the population that you would expect to demonstrate civic leadership in the future, civic engagement. They are the ones we would expect to be struggling to understand the world, to think critically about the rhetoric out there, and to make informed, reasoned decisions. “If they’re not developing their higher order skills, it means they’re not developing the attitudes and dispositions that are needed to even understand that that’s important.”

Despite the images of walking skeletons that greeted American liberators at Buchenwald, the full enormity of the Holocaust was not fully appreciated, even in the Western world, until relatively recently, for the simple reason that “the Americans and the British liberated no part of Europe that had a very significant Jewish population before the war, and saw none of the German death facilities.” Those facilities, and the fields in which the Germans exterminated the vast majority of their Jewish victims, lay in the bloodlands, which were conquered by the Soviets.

But it was in Belarus where the conflagration between Nazis and Soviets, and between collaborationists and partisans, was greatest. By the end of the war, Snyder writes, a full half of the country’s population had either been killed or deported.

To this day, the populations of the former Soviet Bloc, and some elements of their intelligentsia, have yet to come to terms with their historical complicity in the Holocaust, painting their ancestors as victims, which indeed many of them no doubt were, while ignoring the fact that many were erstwhile collaborators.

The Nazi plan to eliminate the Jewish race — a plan which it executed often with the gleeful participation of local collaborators who needed no prompting in rounding up and murdering their Jewish neighbors — is today being downplayed so that Soviet crimes loom larger.

“the vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.” Their murders were personal affairs in that they involved soldiers firing bullets into their bodies; death did not take place within a closed chamber and the murderers saw the faces of their victims. Most of the killing took place in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe.

The perverse irony of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s desire to conquer the bloodlands was that by expanding their empires they diversified them. Suddenly, they had a whole lot of foreigners living under their domain, who would need to be pacified. And so the solution to this problem would have to be the liquidation of massive numbers of people.

What has allowed the Soviet Union to escape the same sort of historical reproach as Nazi Germany is that its killing was carried out in the furtherance of various causes — absolute economic equality, the preservation of a dictatorship, the collectivization of agriculture — that are not commonly considered to exist on the same moral plane as a theory of racial superiority. “In Stalinism mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism; it was never the political victory itself,” Snyder explains.

Academics, journalists and political leaders in this region, particularly in the Baltic states, have put forward a “double genocide” approach to understanding this period of European history, which, unlike the more nuanced take of Snyder (who, while placing the Stalinist and Nazi regimes alongside each other as subjects of historical inquiry, does not equate them in terms of moral depravity), is explicitly political.

Snyder reports that the Nazis deliberately killed upwards of eleven million; for the Soviets during the Stalin period the figure was between six and nine million. On the Soviet side, these numbers are far less than what had originally been believed, due to the opening of Eastern European and Soviet archives in the twenty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This historical airbrushing amounts to “Holocaust obfuscation,” in the words of the academic Dovid Katz, which, he writes, “tries to reduce all evil to equal evil, in effect to confuse the issue in order to write the inconvenient genocide that is the Holocaust out of history as a distinct category.” Last year, for instance, the Lithuanian government passed a law making it illegal to deny that the actions of the Soviet Union in Lithuania constitute “genocide,” as it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

But his acknowledgement that the period of 1933 to 1945 was marked by several genocides, rather than a single one, does not lead him to promote the “double genocide” theory. Snyder has written elsewhere that “The mass murder of the Jews was, indeed, unprecedented in its horror; no other campaign involved such rapid, targeted and deliberate killing, or was so tightly bound to the idea that a whole people ought to be exterminated.” It is morally specious to compare the Jewish Holocaust to the Soviet “genocide” of Balts or Poles or Ukrainians, awful as the experiences of these peoples were, because of the inherently different nature of the methods the Soviet and Nazi regimes used against their subject populations. The Soviet Union had many local collaborators throughout its occupied and satellite territories. And while the Nazis also had collaborators during their occupation of the Baltic States, there was never any room for a Jewish collaborator in the Nazi project.

Though Stalin’s murder campaigns were, in many cases, predicated on ethnic antagonism, the difference is that the Soviets did not exterminate for extermination’s own sake. Once Stalin’s discrete policies had been achieved (the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, for instance), the mass murder stopped, and the Soviet Union eventually wound down its widescale deportations and mass killings in the mid- 1950s. Had Hitler’s  regime, with its animalistic understanding of human nature, lasted beyond 1945, its mass murder and terror would not have decreased. For these tactics were not just means but ends; they were the very lifeblood, the weltanschauung, of nazism itself.

The crucial factor one must consider in evaluating these two strains of totalitarianism is their competing long-term visions, and the policies that were required to execute them. Classifying Stalin’s various murder campaigns (alongside Nazi policies towards Roma, gays, educated Poles and Soviet citizens in Belarus and Ukraine) as “genocides,” which Snyder does, while also singling out the Holocaust as the worst of them all, is not mutually exclusive.

Bloodlands is an incredibly original work. It seeks to redirect our understanding of the Holocaust as primarily an eastern phenomenon, and one which took place among a spate of mass killing policies. When popular interest in the Holocaust and an “international collective memory” of it began to form in the 1970s and 1980s, it focused almost exclusively on the experience of German and West European Jews, the wealthiest and most assimilated on the continent, who died in far smaller numbers than did the Jews of Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States, who were nearly eradicated. “Deprived of its Jewish distinctiveness in the East, and stripped of its geography in the West, the Holocaust never quite became part of European history,”

The academic criticises "an unholy alliance between well-meaning politicians and educationalists" for reshaping history teaching to focus more on skills such as analysing sources while neglecting facts.

Ferguson laments the fact that England is the only country in Europe where history is not compulsory after the age of 14

The historian approves of a passage in Ofsted's report, which highlights a lack of narrative in primary school history teaching."The only thing wrong with this observation is that Ofsted seems to think it applies only to primary school pupils, whereas it could equally well be applied to those in secondary school – and students at a good few universities, too."The "long arc of time" has been replaced by "odds and sods", Ferguson says.

if today we know the scale of Mao’s crimes, it is not as a result of decades of academic work on the subject. The first detailed examination of the famine, Hungry Ghosts (1996), was written by the Hong Kong-based journalist Jasper Becker. It was only in 2010 that the historian Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine appeared, a pioneering study based on years of research in recently opened Chinese archives

Apart from accounts given in the memoirs of those who survived, the human costs of the Cultural Revolution were best captured by Simon Leys (the pen-name of the Belgian sinologist and literary critic Pierre Ryckmans) in his books Chinese Shadows (1974) and The Burning Forest (1987). The authoritative and revelatory Mao: the Unknown Story (2005) is the work of Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday. Aside from Dikötter’s, none of the books that captured the human experience of life under Mao was written by a professional academic.

the prestige of the Mao regime in the west was at its height when the leadership was believed to be at its most despotic and murderous. For some of its western admirers, the regime’s violence had a compelling charm in its own right.

During the Cultural Revolution study sessions were an unavoidable part of everyday life for people in China. Involving “ritualistic confessions of one’s errant thoughts and nightly diary-writing aimed at self-criticism”, these sessions, he writes, “may be seen as a form of text-based indoctrination that resembles religious hermeneutics and catechism” – a “quasi-religious practice of canonical texts”.

Condemned as distorting Mao’s ideas and exerting a “widespread and pernicious influence”, the book was withdrawn from circulation in February 1979 and a hundred million copies pulped.

Gross is currently on sabbatical leave from Princeton and did not respond to a request for comment from the Observer. But at a recent talk, posted online by the University of Haifa last week, he described his work as “a confrontation with ghosts in the consciousness of Polish society’’. He said most Poles were still not aware that 3.5 million Jews had died in Nazi death camps. The Law and Justice government was, he said, “vested in martyrology’’.

“Gross is one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians. Any normal liberal democracy has to have a voice of inner criticism, speaking in the name of minorities and different interests. Gross is one of those voices for Poland.’’

“They don’t have the same chances to get their children internships or jobs at law firms,” Professor Lee said. “So what they believe is that their children must excel beyond their white peers in academic settings so they have the same chances to excel later.”

“It’s become an arms race, an educational arms race,” she said. “We all want our kids to achieve and be successful. The question is, at what cost?”