Does talent matter?

You can also look at the history of the Black Death in Europe, which killed ~60% of the population. This became the foundation for the Renaissance. It made workers, peasants, and craftsmen the most valuable people. Advertisements from that era gave forgiveness for murder and other mayhem if you would visit. The entrenched wealth and privilege of the upper class was severely damaged and other people were given a chance.

This is an example of the effect of catastrophe on entrenched inequality. Scheidel wrote this piece 2 years ago regarding Trumpism, which is about as antithetical to its promises as a policy can be.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheidel-great-leveler-inequality-violence/517164/

The evidence is that the model of the neo-classicals is correct. That model assumes perfect redistribution of wealth. Without perfect redistribution, society and economies will break. The lesson of history is that who wins is mostly arbitrary, mostly has little or nothing to do with merit, and everything to do with opportunity, application, and slamming the door on everyone else, then leaning on the door to keep it shut.

That is the real story of the human race.

Different context, I know, but the Irish martial arts coach John Kavanagh, who has schooled numerous champions including the biggest name in the UFC, Conor McGregor, claims emphatically that there is no such thing as talent.

“The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.” (Unknown author, sometimes attributed to DeGaulle or Clemenceau.)

I wonder to what extent this applies to university admissions.

The obvious other option is that perhaps some populations (ex: the Germans) are broadly more talented than others (ex: their competitors)-and replacing one German with another is empirically ‘better’ than replacing one X (Englishman?) with another.

But that’s doubleplusungood, so won’t be considered.

anon

“This is, of course, the assumption the Founding Fathers adopted in writing the Constitution. I’m afraid, though, that the American politics of the last few years would lead us to change “much less” to “almost as” or even “just as.” Even the best planned institutions will be wrecked if the wrong people are in control.”

Wrong people. Like, the less talented…

I wouldn’t discount the need for talent in creating the infrastructure in the first place. One possibility is that it took a remarkably talented and well motivated elite to reconstruct Germany’s political and social infrastructure after WWII, and remarkable civil servants to develop the institutional basis of what has become the EU. Couldn’t it all have gone terribly wrong without Brandt, Adenauer, the external assisters, and the civil servants who are at the center of any successful institution building?

More locally, I look at my own institution which has been in less-than-ideal environmental conditions in the past few years. To me it seems that we could make all sorts of errors in hiring faculty, staff, grad students, and things would be more or less fine but really I’m not at all convinced that many people who would be willing to run a large public university would have been able to do it well in these circumstances. (I think, in fact, we’ve been remarkably lucky). Our previous Chancellor really didn’t have the necessary skills — it ended up because she experienced a major failure, and had the sense to find another job for which she was better suited, and, after a ship-steadying interim, the Regents had the sense to choose our current Chancellor (whom who was a rejected finalist in the previous search).

Harry @8:

it took a remarkably talented and well motivated elite to reconstruct Germany’s political and social infrastructure after WWII

And yet these “remarkably” talented people were available after the population had been decimated (maybe literally? IDK) in a process that preferentially kills off those most energetic and dedicated to national well-being, it is said. That’s the point of OP: “remarkably” talented people are maybe not so remarkable after all.

I think there is such a thing as talent, and you see it on display in some kinds of artificial competitions. It appears you can’t be a serious contender for a gold medal in many Olympic sports if you’re not born with the right kind of genes for example. Probably not just anybody can master chess or go at the highest levels. Learning how to program computers competently seems to be remarkably difficult for most people. I can attest that lots of practice does not, by itself, transform one into a musician suitable for performing Western classical art music before a demanding audience. But these are not the kind of “talents” being discussed in OP.

One possibility is that it took a remarkably talented and well motivated elite to reconstruct Germany’s political and social infrastructure after WWII, and remarkable civil servants to develop the institutional basis of what has become the EU.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that a lot of those people were Americans, British, and French, and also the effects of the Marshall Plan. We don’t see the same effects in East Germany.

I forget whether it was in The Caine Mutiny or Mr. Roberts, but one of the characters described the Navy as an institution “designed by geniuses to be run by idiots.” And I have heard a quotation attributed to Napoleon that the key to victory is training the average soldier to do the average thing under incredible pressure.

Seems to me that we are in the midst of an experiment that could throw some light on this. We (the US) have a government led by people who abhor expertise and have actively sought to remove those with supposedly rare knowledge of fields of study or problems. They are often replaced by those whose familiarity with the matter at hand barely extends beyond spelling it.

Now we have to decide whether any undesirable outcome is the result of disparagement of talent or of poor structure that should compensate for the lack of it.

The famous Termites studied longitudinally in the mid of the twentieth century had routine greatly productive lives and did not make any obituary worthy contributions.
So the link between “talent” and “making a difference” in this case is questionable and needs to be rethought.

My favorite illustration of this thesis is the blog form itself. The first decade of bloggery created a commentariat that was far more diverse and intelligent than the incumbents inhabiting newspapers, magazines, and journals. The barriers to entry were low, and the new system rewarded talent, rather than connections. (Unfortunately, accuracy requires the past tense.)
Although there are two interrelated issues here. 1. Is “talent” a scarce commodity? 2. Are those deemed talented actually the best ones in their positions? I’d say that the answers to both #1 and #2 are both “no,” with the exception perhaps of athletics and scientists. Which may explain why our ruling class is so obsessed with both.

Talent certainly matters, someone has to program the computers and play the instruments in the orchestra after all. But the talents that get rewarded with money, fame and power are only a small subset of the talents that are needed to run any organization or society, never mind when they are actively harmful to the undertaking.

As a recruiter, I am a firm believer that we have a hazy idea of what a ‘good’ candidate really is, and that we are, as SamChevre say, trying to weed out the worst, then make a selection among the rest that is fairly arbitrary.

That said, I also know that we occasionally luck into hiring someone with exceptional talent at something, but even then the institution matters in terms of providing them the opportunity exercise that talent. How many bad institutions suppress or drive out talent?

There’s a phrase, often attributed to DeGaulle: “the graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

As a historian for a living, currently writing about the history of immigration to the US, I can’t miss how much disdain was heaped on immigrant groups are now held up as models of the right kind of people. It’s almost impossible to overstate the contempt in which Irish immigrants were held: similarly Italians, Poles, Jews, Chinese were all treated as mentally deficient losers from, as Trump would say “shithole countries;” “beaten men from beaten races,” as Frances Walker, Harvard economist, put it in the 1890s.

Your general point may be correct but is not supported by the example of post war Germany. Germany in the decades before 1933 was a far more productive country in science and culture than after 1945. Managerial competence survived intact but creativity did not.

Re College admissions: an Ivy League Dean of Admissions told me that his team think they can pick out 300 people they really want in no time at all, and that they could then take a pool of 6000 or so and a lottery would get them as good results as their forensic process. Make of that what you will…. (sounds right to me).

Very, very good post.

Individual talent, at least in so-called “talent-demanding” fields, matters. But even individual talent fails to flourish without the structures and facilities provided by a “thoughtful” (well-regulated) state. And a well-regulated state – e.g. West Germany – will make the most of the more modest talents of a maximum number of its citizens. It’s a positive feedback loop, I think. [And, one might add, even where individual talent is emphasized, it can normally only reach its apex in a state which provides the appropriate support and encouragement.]

@Harry: my older child, who finished a fairly run-of-the-mill, non English-language high school abroad, once noted that every single one of his good friends would have done well – excelled, even – at his undergraduate institution (Princeton).

This all seems to me to be a fairly compelling core argument against libertarian views which tend to take a dim view of “the state” and its role – such a stance, imho, fails to take into account the science of being human, i.e. of membership in a genetically intensely social species.

Bangladesh and Cambodia offer very good examples of this, when their entire professional or academic class were murdered. But they lacked the infrastructure to recover by themselves. I remember teaching public health and stats to two young Cambodians who had already been promoted to senior management positions In hospitals. I guess you could do some comparative studies to see if the deficit made a difference.

I agree with samchevre that avoiding the duds is most important!

Did anyone ever seriously claim the contrary? The companies that claim they recruit the best and brightest rarely do that or need them. Its frankly rather questionable the McKinseys and Goldman Sachs of this world have any positive productive role in society at all. They are looking for status showman, which is why when push comes to shove they woulrd rather recruit any idiot with the “right” college than looking at the top graduates from the other 99%. They even basically admit as much in less public fora no? I particular loved a description about how Goldman would recruit only graduates of US elte Universities for their Hong Kong (!) department and then complained they would not find enough “talented” people, read: Chinese Harvard graduates.

@
”everything worth doing is worth doing well”

– didn’t mean that it is actually some exceptional or isolated ”German thing” – as this Furniture Maker in New England (we know) proves and then there are ”Italian Talents” – and Italy – which does everything worth doing is worth doing well – if it does it – in a far more fascinating and enjoyful way as anybody else – and anybody who ever drove a Ferrari can attest to – and building a Ferrari – NOW that’s REAL talent! –
-(including the believe – that ”communism” is when everybody can afford a Ferrari)

My first professional job was with my father’s start-up. I had some familiarity with the aerospace industry, which is where my father, his partner, and various consultants came from. I once complained that the task I faced, designing a control panel and writing the software to make it work, would normally be performed by a team.

One of the aerospace veterans, a professor of mathematics, explained that the point of hiring a team was to find the person who would actually get things done. I’m not sure he was wrong; he handled his project capably, and so, to my amazement, did I.

In a later start-up it took just three of us to design and prototype a bulky piece of electromechanical equipment. We relied of course on subcontractors to bend and cut and weld the metal parts, to mold the plastic housings, to print the circuit boards, and we knew how to get this done, and knew who could do this work, from our previous employment. This is a success story embedded in a particular cultural environment, an industrial infrastructure which may no longer exist, at least in my neighborhood.

Sorry for third post in a row, i´ll happily concede i personally would genuinly lack the aptitude for the IT, with my inability to write everything concentrated in a row. Thinking of stuff like this regarding how IT threats people:
“The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week, except when I was on vacation—and the vacations were few and far between.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-marissa-mayer-interview-issue/

And that is definitly not the result of a lack of talents since in that case people would go from unreasonable to more reasonable hours in a downturn. In reality many go to unemployment and the rest stays with even more unreasonable hours.

Another bit of supporting evidence for, “Of course talent matters! Why would you think it doesn’t?” is Gottfredson’s survey on the effect of g on life outcomes. To quote:

The key observation here is that personnel psychologists no longer dispute the conclusion that g helps to predict performance in most, if not all, jobs (Hartigan & Wigdor, 1989). Rather, their disputes concern how large the predictive validities are, often in the context of deciding the appropriate composition of a personnel selection battery.

g can be said to be the most powerful single predictor of overall job performance. First, no other measured trait, except perhaps conscientiousness (Landy, et. al. 1994 pp. 271, 273) has such general utility across the sweep of jobs in the U.S. economy. More specific personality traits and aptitudes, such as extraversion or spatial aptitude sometimes seem essential above and beyond g, but across a more limited range of jobs (e.g. Barrick & Mount, 1991; Gottfredson 1986a).

Second, no other single predictor measured to date (specific aptitude, personality, education, experience) seems to have such consistently high predictive validities for job performance.

Later, Gottfredson looks at how g affects trainability, and finds that even on simple tasks, where everyone can eventually reach a high level of performance, people with low g took, in some cases, 12-24 months to reach a level of proficiency that high-g folks reached after 3 months. So talent matters, even for tasks where everyone can eventually figure out what to do. As it turns out there’s a huge range in what “eventually” can mean!

Maybe the fact that everything was flattened (except know-how) was not the “even though” but “because”. If you have to decide on what to do next, it probably makes it easy if it is right in front of you (i.e. there were no shortage of worthwhile projects, just a shortage of workers to do it). And so there was an easy beneficial spiral of productive projects being completed, workers being paid well and workers spending money enabling new projects. If growth in the economy relies on “creative destruction” (which is really destructive creation – i.e. the new driving out the old), there is no such spiral because while some win, others lose.

well this thread is taking a bizarre turn. Lots of lefties arguing that IQ is a measure of innate talent (but we will pass on racial distributions at this point), and a right-wing troll like me is abut to argue that IQ is a meaningless measure, but …

one of the things I notice as a birdwatcher is how many of my fellow birders have simultaneously a very keen intelligence and knowledge-base round birds, to the extent of being familiar with academic research on birds and other wild-life, and an ability to ask smart questions about what they are seeing and how the life-cycle or evolution works, whilst simultaneously having bypassed most standard measures of intelligence and are generally employed in trades with low academic entry requirements. So I don’t see how IQ or its related measures tells us much. Apart from maths ability.

“Could you work 130 hours in a week?”” well I could birdwatch for 130 hours a week absolutely no problem. So either someone is working 130 hours a week because they are doing something that is to all intents and purposes a paid hobby, or else they have a deep belief that this effort will be rewarded. If you don’t believe that the effort will be rewarded because People Like You aren’t in evidence in the hierarchy of your organisation, then you are much less likely to put in that effort.

Its been my experience that talent requires 4 ingredients: opportunity, aptitude, interest and dedication.

Opportunity is often the piece the individual has no control over – for example it could be that I have the talent to be the greatest concert violinist that ever lived, unfortunately I never had the opportunity to take up the instrument so the world will never know.

Once opportunity is provided -aptitude will be revealed provided that the person has an interest in pursuing the talent and the dedication to develop it sincerely. To my example, even if I had been shown the violin at age 5, if I’d rather play football instead we’d still never know about my latent violin talent.

To the OP – where society and infrastructure supports or creates talent is by providing the opportunities and the resources to convert the talent to use. To some extent its functions like coaching in sports or arts – there is lot of talent available, but without the right coaching, support, infrastructure it might not be identified or developed.

Postwar Germany certainly provided some unique opportunities – I’d argue that someone who managed to survive the war already demonstrated some rather exceptional character skill such that they were hardly luck of the draw candidates for leadership when the war finally ended.

Cranky, I don’t find it obvious that such industries truly rely on exceptional people. Perhaps it is true, but it would be hard to prove. Success in music, for example, seems to have a large self-reinforcing “famous for being famous” component. There are far more good musicians/entertainers than positions. once someone achieves a position of fame, we tend to ascribe qualities to them that set them apart from less famous people. But those qualities are very nebulous, and there is a good case that they are mostly after-the-fact rationalisation for the fame. If the most famous 1000 entertainers were to die tomorrow, another batch will become the most famous 1000. Quite possibly without much objective loss in quality.

The software industry seems to have similar winner-take-all characteristics, perhaps more on the firm level than on the personal level. Take any important software system or business, and imagine that it never existed, and neither any of the people who worked on it. The likely outcome is often that some other system would have grown to fill roughly the same niche, and other people would be hailed as irreplaceable geniuses.

Zamfir–One of the many weird experiments I would fund if I had the money is to have a classical music concert with a mystery soloist doing one of the warhorse violin concerti. The mystery soloist would actually be the second-best violinist in the orchestra, performing behind a screen. I’d then poll the audience and the critics to get their reactions, their satisfaction with the performance, their guesses as to which Big Name soloist it might be, and the like.

I’ll reinforce that the point is being missed by examples from the low side, such as McNamara’s Folly (which I’ve read). The issue is whether there is, in most areas, a 0.01% of people who make a big difference to the success of an organization–or could you do just as well with the best 5% and better design? I’d also emphasize the organization part: in solo activities (language learning, musical performance, mathematics) there really are prodigies whose brains just happen to be wired exceptionally well for that activity (Mozart, Ramanujan, George Green). But that has little, maybe nothing, to do with the issue raised in the post.
[NB “best” means “viewed as exceptionally good at X by other observers”. IQ may correlate for some of this, but trying to capture human abilities by a single variable is folly].

Chris, there’s one sort of evidence you could turn to (indeed, which I’m surprised you haven’t turned to!). This is the economic literature on productivity and migration. When you take people from a low-productivity country and send them to a high-productivity country, does the average productivity of the latter go down? Turns out the answer is no. The migrants very quickly become just as productive as the average citizen. This suggests that infrastructure, institutions, social capital, knowledge and perhaps a whole load of other contextual factors are determining individual productivity, rather than any attributes of individuals. That’s grist to your mill, I would have thought.

I worry that part of the problem here lies in the sheer impossibility of picking apart nature (talent) and nurture (institutions). My parents were both teachers and after they retired spent some time helping out at a local primary school: both were astonished (and saddened) to realise that, even by the age of 6 or 7, kids from poorer households were already less likely to have focus and concentration than kids from (slightly) better-off households. I feel as if I have seen something similar across my entire life: I went to a very socially-diverse school and knew some kids who went on to be surgeons or university lecturers, others who went on to work in dead end jobs. The key difference wasn’t innate intelligence or even interest, but just an ability to stick at it. Again, I doubt that this is innate, so much as formed through early experience, which is, itself, structured by the socio-economic order. All of which is a long winded way of saying ‘institutions’!

Chris @61 “When you take people from a low-productivity country and send them to a high-productivity country, does the average productivity of the latter go down? Turns out the answer is no. The migrants very quickly become just as productive as the average citizen. ”

It’s slightly more complicated than that. AFAIK, the results are conditional on the education level of the migrants. That is, migrants rapidly become as productive as locals with the same education level.

More generally, a lot of the discussion above seems off-point in relation to migration. Except maybe for certain sports where talent is evident at an early age, migration policy can’t select for or against innate talent as distinct from skills acquired through education.

Finally, it’s clear that the effects of migration are massively greater for the migrants themselves than for non-migrants in either the source or the destination country. This fact creates a high ethical bar for those who want to give priority to the concerns of non-migrants.

In conclusion:
I’ve been to Germany too – which, to a greater extent than many other countries (such as my homeland the US), is a functioning and prosperous liberal democracy.

It wasn’t always thus. By the end of the Second World War, Germany had suffered the destruction of its cities and infrastructure, and the death or maiming of a good part of its population and the US (America) – very helpful taught the Germans ”how to behave in the future”.

And then Germany was able to recover and outstrip its former adversaries within a very few decades – not so much with individual talent but with a common philosophy of: ”Everything worth doing is worth doing well…” –
while the US -(and the UK) – instead of focusing on such a philosophy got kind of… confused? – as the celebration of ”talented individuals” became far more important than any ”common” (work) philosophy.
AND the YUUUGEST mistake –
by celebrating ”the upper end of talent” – the (supposedly) ”lower end of talent” – the common workers ”work” didn’t get celebrated anymore… (like in Germany) AND that’s why America -(and the UK?) have become ”Predominant Service Economies” and NOT (like Germany) a ”Predominant Production Economy” – and that’ why Germany (still) can focus and has (still) ”a functioning and prosperous liberal democracy” and the US and the UK…
not so much.

Or is this a far – faaar too simplistic conclusion?

As an aside to what I wrote above I should emphasize that I think the term creative destruction is one of the great misdirections of intellectual history. If the term used was correctly destructive creation a lot of damaging memes would have been avoided.

There is a less important sense in which a flattened society is conducive to growth – the lack of vested interests which must enhance innovation. Or in other words, “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”.

Charlie Parker, possibly the greatest instrumentalist in Jazz history, was glued to his axe 24/7/365 from childhood.
“Excuse me sir, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Practice, practice, practice!”
Wm. Buckley, right twice a day like the stopped(analog) clock said the first few pages of the Boston phone book (Remember those?) would do a better job than Congress.

– and @72
for a documentary about ”Made in Germany” – we once looked at quite a few US households – and while in so called ”poor households” nearly everything was
”Made in China”
in so called ”Rich American Households” nearly everything is either ‘Made in Germany’ (mainly the cars and other machinery) – ”Made in France” -(Fashion and Fashion related products) or/and – ”Made in Italy” (the Gucci bags and the Coffee Machines)

(and the point that US might be still Nr. 1 in the production of weapons and planes – shouldn’t count – as those are more ‘consumer bads’ as ‘consumer goods’)

Interesting – talents vary – large numbers of small, nimble fingers come in very handy when multi-national confectioners are looking for cheap labor in dark, distant places. The Wapo reports that the administration is planning to block some chocolate imports from Africa. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/07/ivory-coast-first-lady-says-ban-cocoa-imports-due-child-labor-would-be-unfair/

Talent becomes effective under particular circumstances – the need for cash makes indenturing their children to chocolate manufacturers the right choice for poor African families. The children themselves miss their chance at an education in many cases. Their talent for doing something other than picking cocoa beans remains untapped.

Choosing to pay 5x the price for a bar of chocolate or a piece of tropical fruit requires a re-evaluation of one’s identity and one’s priorities. Choosing to focus on the sins of the past, or perceived sins of the present is a much cheaper and preferable option for many. The talent for self-deception is integral in most modern economies.

In informal discussions with my own students, as talented as any I know, not one would be willing to stop eating chocolate to improve conditions for indentured children working for multi-nationals in Africa today. Pay 5x as much for access to chocolate? Forget it.

The good news is that we do see some very talented people in institutions and governments who do understand the problem of under-utilizing the talents of the majority on the lower end of the economic-scale. The bad news is that many couldn’t care less. How many consumers wonder why bananas and chocolate are so inexpensive?

That kind of willful ignorance is a feature of a particular kind of talent.

@ph
”In informal discussions with my own students, as talented as any I know, not one would be willing to stop eating chocolate to improve conditions for indentured children working for multi-nationals in Africa today”.

Aren’t you teaching in Japan?

And I’m shocked – as all the German ”Fridays for Future” students I know – would be willing to stop eating chocolate to improve conditions for indentured children – like helping them NOT to have to work for multi-national corporations in Africa today?

Does a 10% difference really make Germany a “Predominant Production Economy”?
@Scott P, @nastywoman

That 10% means that Germany more than 50% larger manufacturing sector in relative terms, which translates roughly into 50% more well paying blue collar jobs, 50% technical/engineering jobs which fall into that category (rather than being counted as “services”). And some portion of the service sector produces demand for a portion of the manufacturing workforce. So yeah, the social effects (income equality, job security, etc) could be quite significant.
Also I would have to think the ability of an economy to innovate or adapt to new circumstances is probably inversely proportional to the relative size of the financial services industry.

There are really two questions regarding talent, I think. One is whether the the people identified as “talented” can be replaced efficiently. The other is whether criteria other than “talent” can be made critical. If “talent” matters, and talent is found across class and racial groupings, then efficiency calls for equality. If talent doesn’t matter, then excluding women, nonwhites, the children of workers, and Muslims is perfectly efficient. Of course, one can define “talent” so that it encompasses “non merit related” qualities, so that he problem disappears.

Then what is meant by “institutions”? Imagine one organization in which everybody works individually and is responsible for developing their own individual knowledge and decision making, and a second organization which works in a more social fashion, where the organization takes responsibility for those things. Those require institutions very different from one another, well beyond internal rules and decision making processes.

– and having to eat a terrible croissant on a Sunday –
(as ”the good baker” is on vacation) –
it might be time to redefine our idea of ”talent” – especially since it needs so little talent to make money as a banker – but so incredible much ”talent” to make a truly good croissant as a baker.

Recruiting the best: https://www.spiegel.de/international/globalsocieties/bosnia-feels-pinch-of-brain-drain-to-eu-a-1280550.html

Canada takes the same “liberal” approach to refugees and immigration.

– and I think the topic of this post is/was:
”Does talent matter”? –
and the fact that ”the talent” of often ignored so called ”simple workers” still matters a lot in a country – which still has a functioning and prosperous liberal democracy – is adding a lot more to global societies well being as financial service exports…

As we once helped Chinese and US and even a UK Camera Team which tried to find out ”how it’s all connected” – and perhaps it would global societies if global academia would try to find out too?

@52: in science research, hiring someone who can sucessfully manage your lab (or division of lab) is way harder than hiring a world-class scientist. The pool of adequate individuals is really small, even given an almost unlimited budget. (Having seen close up some instances of almost infinite budget being made available).

[*] i think I’d better not name names here, but “infinite budget” narrows the list of candidates for which organization I’m thinking of. (It wasn’t DARPA).

Just to return to the assumption of the OP – why are we making the assumption that the German population surviving at the end of WWII had a different average talent level than the pre-war average? Yes, individuals are lost, but how are group averages impacted? And whatever combination of genes, culture and environment gave rise to adult cohorts in 1939, why do we expect a different result for the cohorts coming of age post 1945?

There is plenty to discuss here, but the original example seems very strange and not particularly relevant. Maybe I am missing something about known patterns of German loss of life during the war.