1The evident didactic concern with which economist André Masson has written this book, Des liens et des transferts entre générations, is truly remarkable. It shines through in the detailed glossary, among other things. The book draws the reader in not only because the subject matter is a source of common interest (questions of parentage and transmission resting at the heart of the social sciences), but also because its epistemological and philosophical approach is so ambitious. Today, economics lays claim to being a total social science; in this case, for the best.

2The main argument of the book, which is empirically and theoretically propounded at great length, can be summarized relatively succinctly. Borrowing from Marcel Mauss’s anthropology, and more specifically from his famous 1923 essay The Gift, André Masson proposes a Copernican revolution. In order to take into account the Ricardian equivalence proposition (which, in broad terms, argues that state intervention is ineffective because it will always be anticipated by rational economic free agents whose decisional horizon is infinite), Masson argues that we should replace the “theory” of generational, or dynastic, or philanthropic, altruism (a hypothesis based on the work of Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 [1]) with a structural account of indirect reciprocities among three generations:

Figure 1

“The well-ordered generosity of the pivotal generation”

“The well-ordered generosity of the pivotal generation”

3Three generations, not two: this is a key point in all the analyses economists have developed on the issue of transfer between generations. [2]

4Despite the immense reverence that economists have for Becker—one of the most influential academics in the field of public policy since the 1970s—his view of generational altruism is often seen by social scientists as a product of the Reagan years, the combination of liberal market culture and a conservative view of the family. These criticisms are, of course, polemical and come from so many different angles that they do not fit neatly into the lines of the alternate view provided here by Masson. In fact, his position is of epistemological interest precisely because it ties together canonical propositions from various social sciences.

5No one can reasonably doubt that a theoretical economic approach can lead to a better understanding of societal issues, both past and present. [3] The protocol defined by the Econometric Society in 1933 (formulating relevant hypotheses, translating these hypotheses into a coherent model, and then deducing predictions) expressed a program that could potentially serve as common ground for all social sciences in France at the time of François Simiand—at least in its first two iterations. [4] Nonetheless, Masson repeatedly states that he borrows only in a limited way from anthropology, as if he needed to dispel certain misgivings from within his own discipline. [5] It sometimes seems that Masson’s view of the social sciences is, at least to a certain extent, more competitive than cooperative. The problem is that economic science comes with a particular cosmogony, a vision of the world and of humans (homo oeconomicus) that no one else is necessarily obliged to share. [6] Masson reminds us that econometrics always seems tied to a moral anthropology, just as The Wealth of Nations (1776) was tied to The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). It is therefore more often the anthropology that is questioned (because morality is a question of reason or sentiments, not of “science”) than the mathematical formalizations that characterize econometrics. The following three examples are good illustrations of this.

6The “demonstration effect,” central to the work of Donald Cox and Oded Stark, consists of the idea that parents, hoping to receive support from their children at the end of their lives, decide to teach by example by helping their own aging parents while their children are still young and impressionable. [7] This moral lesson, which is key to the entire issue of cross-generational transfer, is illustrated in the framework of a tri-generational analysis in La housse partie, a thirteenth-century fabliau that tells the story of a bourgeois who marries his son to a knight’s daughter. [8] Has this been true from the thirteenth century onward? Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Michel-Jean Sedaine certainly thought so. But what does psychoanalysis have to say on the subject? It talks about “symbolic castration,” the “murder of the father,” and the “foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father,” all of which would supposedly make the social pact possible. In comparison to the structural explanations proposed by Masson, the “demonstration effect” seems to come from a rather superficial psychological approach.

7The notion of “disenfranchisement” maintains that future generations do not have a say in the political decisions that are taken in the present (always corporatist and egotistical), which will come to affect them later. This argument is a cornerstone of the concept of generational altruism, and it remains just as moralistic and just as unconvincing when it is applied to state action as it is in the face of the consequences of liberal economy. [9]

8Finally, the “ultimatum game,” which allegedly shows that homo reciprocans is averse to inequality, is also heavily weighted from a moral point of view. [10] The concrete conditions necessary to carry out a “game” of this kind are difficult to imagine in any kind of actual social practice. The whole thing would become perverse if the experiment were conducted with people who were impoverished or heavily dependent on each other. Game theory is certainly a powerful heuristic device, but it comes from such a high level of abstraction that it is difficult to deduce social morals from it, much less scientific conclusions. Homo reciprocans is a pure ethical abstraction, an arbitrary induction based on unsubstantiated experiments. But the metaphysics inherent in a specific kind of economics is not what interests Masson; he does not need it, because he borrows his structural framework from anthropology. Yet he belongs to a disciplinary tribe, and had to position himself within it, even though their postulates sometimes impede his arguments.

A “Piteous” Conjuncture that Ends the Spirit of the “Glorieuses”

9Masson’s work comes from an era that is interesting from a historical point of view. This book would have been inconceivable during the Trente Glorieuses; it is a true product of the Trente Piteuses. [11] How should we describe the complete difference in the way these two periods are represented? The difference is economic, of course—statistics prove it—but is it essentially economic? The question is worth asking.

10The concept of intergenerational equity would have been difficult to imagine in the 1960s. For the most part, faith in progress was still untarnished. The fate of future generations would be better than that of current generations, whose fate had been better than that of their parents and so forth, going back to the dawn of time, despite some contingent accidents, mostly war-related. The younger generation had the crucial obligation to compensate for the hardships their predecessors had endured, and children therefore had the duty of taking care of their parents during their old age, following a model that existed in traditional societies. These “glorious” years, which saw the rather late triumph of the supposed consumer society, were years of inflation in which salaries and prices were tied together on a “sliding scale.” On the other hand, the growth of stock market revenue was, it must be said, relatively flat. At the time, the dynamic and innovative salaried manager was held up as an example, while the owner of capital, the timorous and selfish rentier, was criticized. A well-known book has drawn attention to a radical change in discourse that has occurred, because today it is the investor, the shareholder, who is favored and for whom value must be created. [12] Masson reminds us that between 1995 and 2003, households’ assets went up 82 percent, financial assets were multiplied by two and a half, and real estate prices skyrocketed (at least in big cities). [13] It is perhaps this victory of heritable property that constitutes the basis of the contrast between the “glorious” and the “piteous.” The objective foundations of this opposition are in fact fragile, as it draws rather on cultural representations based on divergent expectations and, ultimately, on our conceptions of time.

11Such a notion requires us to examine paradigms. Masson, who rarely cites the critical or pragmatic sociologists, does not make reference to Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s description of “cities” that give birth to “common worlds.” [14] But Masson’s approach is for the most part quite similar, to the point that it shares some of the same weaknesses. How does a history of abstract ideas find its roots in practices? How does it form representations when faced with practical experiences? According to Masson, there are three—and only three—worlds of thought that account for contemporary social thought, and all social thought, or, at least, all of what Marcel Gauchet called “the thinkable.” This is displayed in the following summary table that draws on Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s famous work: [15]

Figure 2

The characteristic elements of the three social logics

Three Pillars: Market Family State Three Paradigms: Free Agent Brother Citizen

The characteristic elements of the three social logics

12Masson believes that this trilogy has a “canonical character” (like liberty, fraternity, equality?). [16] The economic principle that reduces these paradigms to three in relation to the welfare state seems to correspond to a fundamental structure of action. In his recent book, Cyril Lemieux also makes a distinction between three “grammars”: public grammar, natural grammar and the grammar of realism. [17] There is a perfect correspondence between Esping-Anderson’s “three worlds,” on which Masson draws, and the three paradigms of the state. This coincidence is, to say the least, troubling.

13Ultimately, is this tripartite structure not solely based on the three pillars and is it therefore not essentially tautological? A historian would want to add a fourth pillar: the church (and its paradigm, the believer), which would make a fourth approach possible, given that the church was in charge of education and charity in Europe up to, and even beyond, the Enlightenment. From the perspective of the genesis of these ideas, this point is not without theoretical consequences. These universes of thought seem, in some cases, to be fundamentally composite, and it might even be impossible to conceive of one of them independently of the others. Moreover, these are “ideal-types” that cannot be refuted empirically, visions of the world that function despite remaining out of reach of the principle of refutability. We can imagine them intermixing (the “compromises” cited by Boltanski and Thévenot) and we can also imagine that their historical origins subjected them to unpredictable struggles, such that their concrete realizations are imperfect when held up to their canonical ideal-type. Some would say that we need to construct our paradigms differently, as their fundamentally religious or crypto-religious character derives from an endlessly debated Weberian conception. In a similar way, the excellent use Masson makes of the Aristotelian philia should not cause us to overlook Christian caritas and its little sister, pietas, which is caritas oriented towards one’s own, one’s poor cousins, the “shameful poor” (which is to say the declassés), and one’s fellow countrymen. There are strong determinations here, which can be seen in Becker’s altruism—where Christianity is the hidden framework—and even in the idea of the homo reciprocans. The foundations of economic science’s claim to build neat, entirely rational frameworks that are immune to contamination by the other sciences or popular thought are no more solid than those underpinning the equivalent claims made by the other social sciences, or even the natural and physical sciences.

14The first paradigm, the market, seems rational, even too rational! It is faultless and is currently flourishing under the aegis of a return to Adam Smith. The second, the family, seems if not confused, at least complex and heterogeneous, because Masson shows that, ultimately, it has minimal coherence. The way in which the third, the state, is formulated renders it almost contradictory (here Epsing-Anderson’s book does Masson more harm than good). Jean-Jacques Rousseau cannot be seen as the theoretician of social democracy; he is much more the theoretician of the French Republic. The republican model, which involves a struggle between two competing visions, that of the “right,” and that of the “left,” has today become extremely muddled. The social-democratic model, on the other hand, enjoys increasing legibility, despite dubious origins marked by a democratic Marxism with a more empirical than theoretical rationale. Masson cleverly summarizes in telegram form the congenital weakness of the paradigm of citizen equality today, with the remark “the universal is limited to nationals.” [18] The market is quasi-global; churches (at least those that consider themselves to be universalist) are potentially global; however, social security, healthcare, and pensions cannot be. The market is global, but what about the “family”?

The “Cunning of Reason” of Structures

15Masson frames the social problems that emerge out of familial inheritance within the context of economic rationality (always in reference to Ricardian equivalence, because the author takes pains to use language that his economist colleagues can hear). Without denying the heuristic power of economics and economic history, we should not forget that the family was an inexhaustible subject for fiction from the seventeenth century onwards. It was also a central focus for other social sciences: demography and, first and foremost, functionalist and structuralist anthropology (Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Jack Goody, and Claude Lévi-Strauss), as well as psychoanalysis.

16I would like first to draw attention to one small detail that is nevertheless not without importance. In Masson’s analysis of families, it would be useful to substitute the word “corporate” for “holistic.” In the tradition of Radcliffe-Brown, [19] the family is corporate, and this word is much less shocking for an economist than “holistic.” It could perhaps create a useful rapprochement between business and the family (at least in the English language).

17More fundamentally, the hypothesis that allows Masson to structure his scientific approach comes from an abstraction: he considers the generations in themselves and intergenerational inequality, but leaves aside the question of intragenerational inequality. [20] This question is clearly important if the population is composed of one-third inheritors and two-thirds non-inheritors, which is to say, simple salaried workers (here it is worth returning to the distinction between the Trente Glorieuses and the Trente Piteuses). [21] The shift from a structure of JAV (J = youth [jeunes], A = active [actif], V = elderly [vieux]) to JNAV (with N marking the beginning of working life and A the period of maturity before retirement) is particularly useful, but it nonetheless has the inconvenient effect of breaking the convention of generational unity because, in fact, it only considers the third of inheritors (in N) whose parents are rich. This demonstration comes to the conclusion that high wages are useless without inheritance. We are in an economy that values rent (unearned income from capital) over salary (which is, above all, used to take out loans). More descriptively, if the difficulties faced by the young are especially related to housing, their elders provide them with considerable assistance, proportional to the rise in property values (a consequence of the fact that households’ assets went up 82 percent over a short period of time). The use value of an apartment is identical whether it is worth one hundred thousand euros or six hundred thousand euros, a price that matters little to the owner as far as she or he is only an occupant, but that becomes a critical factor as soon as there is a question of exchange or mobility. The rent of such an apartment, on the other hand, will vary according to its value, and will put it out of reach of young people, even those with a good income or from property-owning backgrounds. If young people do happen to rent their accommodation or enter the housing market, the assistance given to them by the older generation is simply a compensation for the precipitous rise of urban property values (and the resulting enrichment of the older generations). It may seem as if a kind of Ricardian equivalence is at work here. But young people with low incomes from property-poor backgrounds, and therefore without the prospect of inheritance or the ability to borrow, find themselves in a much more “piteous” situation, especially on this count. The Trente Glorieuses, when birthright and inheritance were not at the heart of dominant representations of society, are indeed a bygone era.

18Are we not today in the typical situation of traditional inheritance-based societies, a tradition from which the Trente Glorieuses represented only a transient departure? In the seventeenth century, rich parents gave money to their son or son-in-law so that he could purchase a public post that would bring him social status and income. At the time, speculation was focused on a public position rather than urban real estate (which was fairly low in value). V, the older generation, were rentiers and J, the younger, were debtors but also future rentiers. Patriarchy rested on this dichotomy. This is a far-fetched comparison, but it does leave us with the following hypothesis: without speculation, intergenerational transfers within circles of economic or political elites would be based on something different, such as, for example, a system that made no distinction between inheritors and non-inheritors. But then the social configurations of transmission would be more structural than historical—an inference rigorously drawn (perhaps overly so?) from the detour into anthropology on which Masson bases his approach.

A Structural Problematic of Transfers

19It is clear that, in terms of this generational analysis, historians will have difficulty with Masson’s treatment of the past, which he sees as an era of universal poverty, and from which he takes only that which valorizes contemporary society, presented as synonymous with prosperity. Nothing could be more debatable. There were many wealthy people in Europe before the era of the French Revolution, and things went well for them, just as, with a few minor exceptions, things go well for men and women in our contemporary society who are endowed with considerable inherited or acquired wealth. [22] In addition, the problems that the wealthy and powerful faced in the past are not radically different from those facing wealthy generations today. This is true even though the current process of transmission between generations has seemingly been simplified drastically, because, from 1789 onwards, status (such as nobility) was no longer inheritable in France, at least from the standpoint of the law (this is the case since the nineteenth century for most European countries). But social practices are more complex than legal frameworks, and we can still advance the hypothesis that the efforts to make a family “corporate” draw on the implicit construction of a status, which is no longer enshrined in law but which functions socially, even within the republican ideology that Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron forcefully denounced for its false appearances and hypocrisies. [23] We should therefore wholeheartedly support the search for a unified conception of structural processes of transmission at the heart of the rentier societies—in all their historical [24] and geographical [25] diversity—that value patrimony and capital over the spirit of entrepreneurship and work, which was certainly the case in every society prior to the industrial and political revolutions of the eighteenth century. The importance of these intergenerational ties and transfers is, in today’s globalized society, the corollary of the crisis of the salaried workforce. [26]

20It may also seem, in our present day, as if the JAV triad does not sufficiently account for the rites of passage between the three stages, the periods of transition that today have a tendency to drag on and on. For example, the transition between finishing one’s education and obtaining a stable job—Francois Dubet’s galère (struggle), which is characterized by the precariousness and near impossibility of accumulating property by borrowing [27]—or the transition between retirement (while the unemployment of middle-aged men and women increases) and more or less palliative or stopgap measures. However, it does seem as if the first transitional period between school and employment has tangible statistical effects that mobilize the proponents of intergenerational equality, whereas the second period—preretirement and the gradual, forced, cessation of activity—does not have nearly as many. We should ask ourselves whether this counterintuitive statistical effect is not a consequence of the lack of attention paid to intragenerational inequality. Young people from “families,” those who own property, suffer because they have trouble breaking into the labor market, while the salaried workers who have little significant property suffer at the end of their careers from difficulties imposed on them by the existing labor market. [28] Statistics are full of the wealthy. But not all of the older generation are rich or well-off, to paraphrase the title of a study cited above.

21From the economist’s point of view, in order for there to be “transfers” between generations, there needs to be something to transfer. It nonetheless remains true that inheritances are not solely material, even if it seems harder now than before to transmit know-how outside of symbolic or economic capital. The examination of these “ties” can have a general analytic usefulness, however, even if they would not apply to some sectors of society as a whole. By giving a lesson in economics, Masson gives his readers a lesson in social science and methodology.