In my tradition of rescuing sufficiently fine comments from the relative oblivion that are long comments sections, I am reprinting Thulean Friend‘s detailed comment on Israel’s prospects in the last Open Thread.
I got into a discussion with Dmitry some time ago about emigration patterns from Israel. His postion was that it was an increasing problem. I was skeptical. Israel has seen rising economic success in recent years, it is far more peaceful than even a few decades ago and pro-Palestinian sentiment appears to be on an ebb, meaning any cultural/social factors (i.e. international shaming that was done in the 1980s against Apartheid South Africa) are also absent. On top of that, the media has been sounding the alarm of rising ‘anti-Semitism’ in the West, which presumably should strengthen the hand of those wanting to stay in Israel.
So I went about researching the issue, purely out of curiosity.
Well, in terms of direction, at least, Dmitry’s instincts were right. The Shoresh Institute, headed up by the former director of the Taub Center (a premier Israeli think-tank), has published a paper on this very topic just a few months ago. The entire paper is great and should be read, but here’s an (inadequate) summary:
What matters in this debate is not the quantity of the emigration per se but the quality of the emigrants and the rate of growth of the latter’s flight from Israel. While Israel has low overall levels of emigration, at 1.1% of the population over two decades, it has a surprisingly high – and rising – rate of emigration of its cognitive class.
Israel is more dependent on the highly skilled than most countries, due to a lower average level of the general population.
Despite the high-tech sector’s success, Israel has in fact falling behind the frontier in productivity. Why?
Turns out that a large part of their success comes from a tiny population. This would support the ‘smart fraction theory’.It is this group, together with academic researchers and physicians, who are emigrating in increasing quantities.
The share of emigrants to the US (the country he focuses on) has been rising. From 1995-2005, the number was 66,000. From 2006-2016, the number jumped to 87,000. Population growth in Israel has been rapid, but he controlled for that.
This means that without continued aliyah in large numbers (and preferably young jews), there is an increasing net brain drain from Israel.
Note that Dmitry talked about not just the US but also the EU. How does it look for the overall share of academic researchers? Just in the recent years, there has been a notable uptick.
A reasonable objection at this stage would be, well, what about returnees? Maybe a lot of them go abroad but a lot come back. Nope:
What about the type of academic emigrant? Turns out that those most critical for Israel’s R&D research in high-tech are also those most likely to leave:
Note the text in the image. It says “graduating from 1980 to 2010”, so this is a long-run stock measurement. It says nothing about the flow, which have gotten worse in recent decades with an acceleration in recent years.
Physicians are also increasingly leaving.
I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Coming back to my initial observations about Israel not being the conventional success story as often portrayed (outside a high-performing elite doing truly magnificent work in high-tech, academia and R&D) is the issue of wages.
As Ben-David points out, Israel’s low GDP per hour worked (PPP) – a measure of productivity – means that it cannot pay high (PPP-adjusted) wages. This is a primary reason why people are leaving. It seems nationalism is decreasingly important for many young highly educated Israelis, the most critical part of its country’s future economic success.
What does the future hold? This is how Israel did on the 2015 PISA exam.
Note that Haredi boys don’t even take the PISA exams, so we don’t know what their scores are. But it is highly likely that the scores are terrible, given that they quit after 8th grade. They are not going to be equipped to sustain Israeli’s high-tech success. The less said about the arabs, the better. Even Hebrew, non-Haredi speakers’s score, while certainly respectable, is not amazing.
But here’s what worrying if you’re an Israeli policymaker:
This means that the burden to keep up the economy is falling on fewer and fewer shoulders who are actually capable of it.
To add to that, Israel has some of the highest real estate costs:
… and some of the highest prices. That is why it’s PPP-adjusted per capita GDP is lower than its nominal income.
You go forward 2-3 decades and it is not hard seeing an even greater intensification of these trends.
Long story short, Dmitry is correct about these trends and I had underestimated them, because I looked at overall levels of emigration (by which Israeli emigration is low) rather than at the very high-end, where Israeli emigration is substantial. Israel is also a very top-heavy society perhaps more dependent on its smart fraction than most, if not all, other OECD economies as shown by the higher share of tax income coming from the top two declines earlier. So this hits them much harder.
What’s remarkable is the rapidly rising share of populations with essentially low productivity and third-world achievement levels (haredim + arabs) compared to the current prime-age working population. This means that the yawning gap between the G7 and Israel in productivity is unlikely to close and may in fact widen even further going forward.All of this would put further pressure on educated Israelis to contribute even more, leading many to simply pack their bags. And increasingly, many indeed do that.
I’d be happy for anyone to come with additional evidence on this topic.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
as the diaspora destroys the ethnic and social cohesion of the West the original reason for zionism decreases
(until the level of social cohesion drops below the minimum necessary and the West collapses into ethno-sectarian civil war).
Sorry, what? I don’t even have a dog in this fight, but c’mon, that’s patently false.
I don’t think Haredim are inherently dull-witted though at least. Though perhaps two centuries of ‘boiling-off’ of the more creative/talented/independent-minded of the original Haredi population might have changed their overall profile. To what degree Haredim are different from pre-Haskalah Jewry in general I don’t know.
Think about it. The last serious internal conflagration was arguably the intifada in the late 1990s/early 2000s. True, Israel got its nose bloodied in the 2005 scuffle with Hezbollah, but that was largely a defence reaction from the Lebanese side due to Israeli incursions and Israel had the escalation dominance. The Israelis simply decided it wasn’t worth the price and pulled back. Hezbollah was strong enough to resist but far too weak to attack with a proper army on Israeli territory. That hasn’t changed. Since then, Israel has occasionally pounded the Gaza Strip and received a few missiles in return (most of whom either miss their targets or are intercepted by the Iron Dome). If you add up all the body bags during the intifada, it doesn’t come close to the post-2005 period.
It gets even more dramatic is when you go further back, to 1973. Israel was in very dire straits and the air lift from the US did play an important part in solving a very real crisis, as many Israeli statesmen later confessed in their biographies. Nothing like that is even conceivable today, not just because the Israeli army is far more impressive today but also because its diplomatic relations are far stronger. It is close with a number of Arab countries and aside from the one-off rant about the Palestinians, Erdogan basically accepts their legitimacy. Israel is safe. Even Iran, supposedly the new ‘Nazi Germany of the Middle-East’ is not an existential threat. Don’t ask me. Ask the Mossad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBqTr8tr7Ac
This is precisely why the emigration is remarkable. Israel has never been safer or more prosperous, yet the emigration rate of highly skilled Israelis is picking up. That should be a nightmare for you if you were an Israeli policymaker, because the problem is home-grown.
The chart comparing the demographics between prime-age workers and the 1st grade in 2016 is crystal clear: there will be an increased pressure in the decades ahead on an ever smaller share of highly skilled Israelis to carry a larger and larger burden on sustaining the high living standards as the average sinks lower towards third world levels.
Many of these highly skilled Israelis will simply shrug their shoulders and pack their bags. That was Dmitry’s point and he was right. You can’t sustain a 1st world economy with an increasingly third world population, at least if your smart fraction are packing their bags at an ever-increasing rate. I thought that Israeli patriotism would be sufficient to stop that but apparently not. And Israel is not a meek country by any stretch, so if that can happen to them then none of us are safe if we don’t maintain high living standards.
Maybe this can also be a gentle pushback to the “smart fraction” theory, namely that averages also matter. Smart fractions alone may not be enough.
Well, I’m moving to Israel, so this should go a long way towards offsetting any smart fraction emigration.
Quality not quantity.
Hmmm, at first I thought this was an interesting point, but it turns out it was an interesting point.
The Ashkenazi Haredim are definitely not dullwitted. They are the source of the vast majority of the West’s Jewish intellectuals in the original sense, pre-secularisation. So the latent genetic potential is there. However, not all Haredim are Ashkenazi in Israel.
More importantly, even very smart people will be useless if they are not educated properly and given the right social framework to progress. That’s why the Jewish community remained in ignorance Before the European enlightenment came knocking (or bulldozing) on their door. That’s why North Korea remains a mess today and why Maoist China was a disaster. It’s not enough with the genetic basis, if it isn’t used properly. Reading Torah all day is useless in a modern world where national power equals economic strength and high-tech supremacy.
Israel’s hope will be that a sufficient amount of them will secularise. That was Ben-Gurion’s bet when he handed the keys to them in religious affairs in the early years of the state. Back then they were a tiny portion and he thought they would keep small as the massive secular majority would assimilate them.
We obviously know today how well that assumption aged. He later recalled this deal as one of his worst political mistakes in his life. He never believed they would keep intact as strongly as they have and grow as large as they have. But they did. So why should we now assume that they suddenly will do what Ben-Gurion wished given that there’s no sign that they did over the last 70 years as they keep growing as a percentage of the Israeli population.
Israeli society is very polarised over this issue. Many Israeli politicians have built their careers on anti-Haredim hatred (Yair Lapid’s father and to some extent his son). Avigdor Liberman refused to enter into a coalition with Netanyahu because of the Hardim issue. Now he’s pushing for a ‘unity’ government with the center-left. We’ll see what happens after the upcoming elections, which are soon due. Either way, I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this. If there had been, it would have been applied decades ago. And in the meantime, Israel’s smart fraction is increasingly seeking greener pastures abroad as Israel fails to catch up in productivity and the wages lag as a result compared to what they can get in the best OECD countries:
https://i.imgur.com/JDd5Tx9.jpg
Remember, the comparison is not Israel with itself. There’s no question that they have improved massively over the last few decades. But the best have not stood still either, and in fact have expanded their lead over Israel. Those countries – principally the United States – are where the smart fraction of Israel are emigrating to, but also Australia, Canada, Germany, Switzerland etc.
Is this situation really unique to Israel? It seems rather reminiscent of white flight in the US and Europe, with the primary distinction being that Israel is so small and the real estate is so expensive that instead of moving to suburbs, Israelis are simply emigrating.
White flight in the US (and now Europe) seeks to escape violence and social dysfunction.
Israeli emigrants seek higher material standards of living.
Very good post by Thulean Friend.
One interesting question is to what extent negative emigration pattern can be offset by transfers of technology and capital from the diaspora.
I see it claimed at times that the younger elements of the secular diaspora are less ethnocentric. Is this actually true?
The diaspora itself is also increasingly religious, though I don’t know how many are ultra-Orthodox (some of whom actually oppose Zionism). There are also talented Orthodox people in the diaspora like Jared Kushner (though he is in fact a mischling, and perhaps not actually that talented).
It’s bad writing, plain and simple. No excuses. It should say:
Maybe AK can edit the original post to include this correction.
AK: Done.
Yes, won’t many Haredi later in life shift to the religious or secular category? If things become dire, couldn’t rabbis facilitate it easily? Judaism is pragmatic.
If fertility success among the Haredi is determined by ability to study the Talmud, they’re still selecting for intelligence and studiousness. Maybe the Haredi are the true elite subpopulation and their role is reproduction. The dumbs are boiled off to maintain the here and now.
Seems like Jews have a hareditary defect. Not only are they economic and military dead weights for Israel, but the higher the proportion of diaspora heebs they form, the harder it will be for goys to sympathize with Jewish concerns (ie expect an “alarming rise in anti-semitism”).
Even the poorest are fed, clothed, sheltered and have access to healthcare. I doubt there’s any selection for intelligence occurring.
Why? – it’s not only because they have brown skin.
It’s because Israel is economically (and politically) a partial island, and not completely unintentionally, as they love import substitution.
Hi-tech is like parapet they built which recently was able to climb out of the island, across a moat, and connect to the global economy.
It’s a different world than the domestic economy.
Ironically, for a Jewish country, Israel’s banking sector is very undeveloped and globally uncompetitive (even less than Lebanon’s banking industry). Israel has a lack of bankers and financing. However, the hi-tech sector economy has access to global financial services (which the rest of the economy does not).
It’s because Israel’s economy is partially like an island.
This is not completely unintentional. They have extreme de facto import substitution, as a result of companies which control imports to the country and seem to increase prices of foreign products multiple times (in collusion with the families which control the local economy).
This reaches the extreme case when you realize there are wide variety local Israeli produced Russian products in the supermarkets, with Russian language packaging (all produced locally).
They put these local products next to imported products in supermarket, however, the imported products are raised by the importers to multiple times higher price than they cost in EU supermarkets.
So as a result there is de facto import substitution – where you can eat twenty kinds of Israeli produced “Russian” pork sausages (I don’t think I am even exaggerating – “Russian supermarkets” in Israel only sell Israeli produced pork products).
Or three different brands of competing Israeli chocolate brands. Or three different kinds of local Israeli produced dishwasher soap powder, sold next to foreign imports whose price is increased multiple times to make the local one seem competitive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss_Group
Communal dairy producers – Tnuva (whose high prices led to “Cottage Cheese protests” in 2011)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tnuva
This is far more “import substitution” than Putin is trying.
Most of the billboards in the streets, are only with photos of Israeli models (or African immigrants), advertising Israeli clothes brands – which do not exist outside Israel (although this is recently changing, now they introduced cheaper foreign brands like Zara and H&M).
Their main fashion brand is “Castro”, and their main models include illegal immigrants from Sudan. This guy is very famous in Israel (I see reports about him in YouTube)
https://www.castro.com/en/Striped-T-shirt-382108.html
End result is not only high prices, but also that a large part of the economy is in unprofitable sectors, like working in some factory producing Israeli socks and Israeli glue sticks, for a tiny domestic market.
Implications for Russia ‘import substitution’ – of course, the effect is less negative in Russia, as Russia has a vastly larger domestic market.
But the same principles are universal since they were written by Adam Smith and David Ricardo – higher prices, less productivity, etc. Proportion of income expended on food in Russia was in continuous downward trend from 1999, until 2014. However, since 2014, this proportion is beginning to increase again.
Israel’s domestic economy is controlled by 16 families, who also seem to control imports to the country. They can increase the price of foreign imports until their own products become competitive.
https://www.haaretz.com/1.4935450
Same families also control the media of Israel.
Effect allows them to become rich and to employ many low level workers, but the economy itself extremely uncompetitive.
Wrong. Since the productive minority makes up only 2 – 3 % of the population, Israel obviously is able to pay them well enough to stay. In fact, the salaries at Rafael, IAI, Intel and even the universities are competitive. There is constant movement between the USA and Israel at the science level, it is natural and happens everywhere. No worry. The Jewish people has been losing its elite for 2000 years.
I remember these emigration doom and gloom articles from the 90s, right before the tech boom.
Output (emigration) more like an extreme version of what happens in Russia.
More educated, young and talented a person in Israel is, the more likely they are to emigrate from Israel (exactly like in Russia – the more intelligent person is, the more likely they will emigrate from the country).
However, Israel has an additional input stream, as a country of immigrants.
Today, around 30,000 immigrants go to Israel each year as Law of Return. Most immigrants to Israel are young people from Russia/Ukraine.
However, filtering among this group is even higher than among the domestic population of Israel.
Immigrants who attain post-graduate qualification – great majority will leave Israel after few years (perhaps benefiting from free education for immigrants in Israel).
While immigrants with no university educational qualifications, remain in Israel in far higher proportions.
My impression from peoples’ appearance, is the “gopnik” style immigrants in Israel from Russia/Ukraine, have a higher proportion who love living in Israel, and will never leave there.
In the supermarket in Israel in certain poorer areas, you can hear a lot of Russian/Ukrainian people, mixing a lot of Hebrew words in their conversations, as they’ve been living there for maybe 15 or 20 years already.
The quality of immigrants coming towards Israel is not bad, though. The gap between the migrants and the natives is way smaller than in western countries. (PIAAC data)
Israel attracts immigrants with higher scores compared to most european countries or the US.
Some e.g. 150 IQ Russians are also repatriating to Israel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kjty4LibMo
But statistically, unlikely to stay there – in this case, it will be because of the better job opportunities will be outside Israel.
Exception is really computer science, where there are quite good job opportunities in private sector Israel. (Although it still seems quite closed and would require some Hebrew language ability to be on an equal working life compared to in a Western country).
In university computer science, it seems only around 1/2 (?) of Israeli computer scientists in Wikipedia (?) are living in America now, so Israel could probably be better even for academics in computer science (compared to other sciences).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Israeli_computer_scientists
Here he is accurate.
Israel’s “militaristic culture” was reversed already in the 1990s, and it corresponded to declining military expenditure.
In the 1970s, Israel had 30% of GDP expenditure on its military. Now this is like only 7% of GDP.
https://i.imgur.com/iV2cuA3.jpg
If we compare Israel with Russia – Russian Federation peaks at 5,4% in 2016. (So Israel has lowered its expenditure on military from 30% in the 1970s – when it was basically a military state -, to now not being so much higher than ordinary, non-militaristic countries, where the army is not the center of culture).
https://i.imgur.com/0s2i8vk.jpg
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Culturally, 1980s/1990s in Israel, was like 1960s in America.
Liberalism and hippies have taken over the cultural sphere in 1990s Israel. Rabin is the icon of this decade.
Israel’s militaristic culture is rapidly declining.
At the same time, Israel’s conventional military enemies have faded, and the USSR no longer exists to arm them.
Israel shifts to conflict with unconventional/terrorist groups (Israel’s military becomes more of a police force against terrorist or guerrilla groups, than involved in conventional military confrontation of previous decades).
Btw israeli quality science output has remained at almost constant share, while most of the western and developed east asian one has declined. Looks quite good for a developed country, and way higher than what GDP per capita would predict.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/noosphere/
Yeah, great success. When does this shitty little pseudo country stop mooching off us and other European countries??
How does that fit with brain drain?
It does not fit, unless there are other factors responsible?
Israel gets humongous amounts of free money, free weapons and free technology from a lot of countries. It can only exist as a parasite state, turn this off and Israel would really be a shithole, which is why they are so absolutely terrified about BDS.
Interesting. I have personally observed this, having met several educated Israelis, from a variety of communities, who chose to leave the country and pursue careers elsewhere after receiving their diplomas, but for some reason, it never occurred to me that this could be reflective of widespread brain-drain. In retrospect, the number of well educated Israeli emigrants I’ve encountered is completely disproportionate to the size of their community where I live. I’d always assumed that this was simply because education was highly valued amongst them.
What do you predict will be the practical effect of this on Israel in the long run? For that matter, what will be the practical effect of Russia’s brain drain? I’ve read numerous ecstatic proclamations in western outlets that Russia is doomed due to emigration, but Russia receives a large number of immigrants from the former USSR and I seem to recall that Anatoly has written in the past that Russia’s brain drain has been much exaggerated.
It seems like a major question for Israel, and perhaps to some extent the West/the world more broadly, in the future is how much potential human capital is in the Haredim.
True, I misspoke. The true parallel is high housing costs in major western cities causing suburbanization, which I guess can’t really be called white flight.
Agreed
The trend where Israel’s Men of the Mind leave that country for places which offer better opportunities, like heroes in an Ayn Rand novel, might explain why Israeli immigrants in the U.S. now run the Ayn Rand Institute.
Interestingly enough, though, if Israel will become overpopulated as hell, then this could possibly trigger eugenic fertility in Israel due to the fact that real estate and the cost of living are going to be so high that only the most successful Israelis are actually going to be able to handle this–with the result possibly being that they will finally once again begin reproducing more than the duller Jews (at least in Israel).
Off-topic, but how much less do you think that Israel’s emigration problem would have been had it not been for the Holocaust? Without the Holocaust–and with much more Ashkenazi Jews moving to Israel–you’d expect Israel to have a higher average IQ (perhaps significantly higher) and thus higher wages and higher labor productivity.
Also, why not have Israel import smart immigrants from other countries, encourage mass intermarriage between them and Israeli Jews, encourage eugenic fertility among its remaining Jews, and adopt a more inclusive definition of Judaism so that patrilineal Jews can be considered Jewish without actually having to convert?
Incidentally, given the descriptions of Israel as a pretty “shabby” and surprisingly badly-run country (from Dmitry, etc.), I am impressed that its average wage turns out to be $3000 per month. https://tradingeconomics.com/israel/wages
For comparison, Spain – 1,800 EUR; Portugal – 1,200 EUR; Greece – 1,100 EUR. Equivalent to France!
This really does go to show how far a smart fraction will take you.
The counterfactual history in which there was no Holocaust would first need to be described.
If Central and Eastern Europe had retained their pre-1933 policies on Jewry, probably not that many Ashkenazim would have picked up stakes. Maybe a lot of Polish Jewry would have emigrated as they outbred their economic niche and thus many Polish Jews were not prosperous.
If Central and Eastern Europe had maintained their 1930s antisemitic policies (it was not just Germany–other countries were inspired by German success on this front and adopted similar legislation), then there could have been greater Ashkenazi emigration to Israel than what historically occurred.
Israel also received a very large amount of investment capital thanks to the diaspora in its critical, formative stage.
Greek wages incidentally were also much higher prior to the crisis. The country’s per capita GDP, if you can believe it, was on the same level in Germany (though wages weren’t as high).
For Israel, it’s not new, but ongoing process.
Also I think it’s less extreme now than in the past (imagine Israel in the 1970s, when 30% of their GDP was military expenditure, and most people would not have air conditioning and electric fans).
I guess it’s selecting all the time for this rough peasant/proletarian people, which predominates in Israel.
“Delicate personalities” are constantly leaving, or do not go to the Middle East.
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Among Russian/Ukrainians immigrating to Israel, it’s mostly young people who just want adventure.
My experience is that people there seem to be usually immigrants from harsher cities, disproportionately.
For Russia it is quite recent and the worst was the 1990s. And the proportion is still much smaller, in a much larger country.
I love these types of posts, this one and the Jewish museum of tolerance, since they troll the usual antisemites who inhabit the unz website by being fair and measured. Israel is a great country and I was really happy and productive when I went there for a job and lived there for about half a decade. I made great friends among locals and foreigners, even if maybe my lifestyle was a bit of an island. Finishing work at 8pm and then walking 5 minutes to a kiosk to have a beer with the alcoholic Hungarian string theorist under guaranteed warm and non rainy weather (with a small chance of missile alret), or some local alkies, was a great shaping experience.
Unfortunately we had to leave since it’s really hard to immigrate there, even if you have a job offer. A good friend of mine from south Baden-Wurtemberg did it, but he married a local and now works down south (in his field, but he could have been making twice as much money back in Germany). I spent a lot of time learning Hebrew and kept showing off how good I was at it to him, but now he might be better actually.
While we were there it never seemed that my money went that far, even though I had a European size salary. The prices on basic products were atrocious. However, I do remember that at the end I started to see a lot of Russian food products and I kept buying the soups from Karelia pretty often. I saw them again when I went to Kazan a month ago and bought a few. They were cheap and beat out all the Israeli alternatives and usually sold quickly.
As the data in the post shows, it’s the people with the PhD who are most likely to leave. This is because there hasn’t been a new research institute established in Israel in maybe 30 years (and Ariel doesn’t count as it’s quality it’s terrible). Usually the people who leave are ambitious and want to get a faculty job and you simply can’t do that in Israel as there are basically only 5(6) places where it’s a workable proposition. And until recently you had to show that you could get Israeli citizenship, or it would be pointless even if you had a faculty offer. I think that the Masters people are often smarter as they know what they want and are not willing to waste an extra 4 years of their life to make themselves unemployable and will just accept a job in the Israeli high tech sector instead. Though some of those jobs did require a PhD actually because the amount of research you have to do is intense… I wonder if the IQ of the Masters level people is really lower than the PhD grads. Anyways, a lot of the brain drain of these grads can be solved by building two new research universities and supporting them with 1 billion dollars each for the first 20 years until research parks grow around them. Oh, and also give foreigners the right to get a green card that would lead to citizenship… It shouldn’t be too hard to do, but the politics in Israel is crazy. I stopped paying attention to it basically the moment I left.
It’s currently a transition country, between third and first world.
Probably Japan in the 1960s, has a similar atmosphere (before they had good infrastructure and buildings).
However, Israel has serious problems, which countries like Japan in equivalent stages of development did not – e.g. massive brain drain, import substitution (control of domestic economy by 16 families), illegal immigration from Africa and (worst of all) rapidly growing Haredi and Arab sectors which are already 1/3 of the population.
Salaries for computer science graduate in Israel, are now almost the same as London.
However, remember for example – buy a Volkswagen Golf in Israel is $35,000, which in America costs $21,000. This is because of the importers’ slice of the cake, and the taxes on the import of automobiles.
And it is the typical story for buying foreign products there.
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If Israel had Walmart and Aldi supermarkets, then the population would suddenly be quite rich, considering the lower prices of the products in those supermarkets relative to salaries. But then such foreign supermarkets would undermine a lot of the uncompetitive import substitution industries in Israel.
But in Spain, Portugal, Greece – you have cheap housing, as well as excellent modern EU funded infrastructure and public transport.
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Whereas in Israel – Tel Aviv has no mass transit to your office, except for buses.
And accommodation even in a third-world buildings in Bat Yam cost like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlPutWx50Ow
I’m no expert on the topic, but don’t large sectors of the Israeli economy and workforce depend on such substitution? I’m thinking of the agricultural sector in particular, where Israel having some self-sufficiency in food is critical to its national security; especially when you consider deteriorating European attitudes to Israel or America’s slow motion breakdown.
Anyway Israel’s brain-drain is bad, but nothing compared to Eastern Europe. I actually think supporting the Haredim makes sense in the long-long term, considering there is almost no other intellectually capable group in the world that has lots of children (Mormons? Amish? Old Believers?).
I agree that Israel should allow legal immigration, without the requirement for the immigrants to have Jewish heritage.
VC funding in Russia was $714 million in 2018.
While in Israel, it was $650 million for just July.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startups-raised-over-650m-in-july-1001295704
One month in Israel, startups are raising almost as much as a year in Russia.
(And yet Israel produces almost ten times less computer science graduates than Russia, in absolute numbers, per year).
Agricultural production is supposed to be quite competitive in Israel, so it is possible it could compete with foreign imports in a fair market (especially when considering transportation costs) – because it’s famous for being capital intensive.
The low productivity will be in many areas though, and surely not most of them should have security importance?
For example, I bought a recharger for an old iPhone model (which I use for travelling) in Dizengoff Center (shopping mall in Tel Aviv) last year and it says “made in Israel”.
In any normal country, it would say “made in China” for an iPhone 4 recharging cable. But Israelis must have a factory producing iPhone 4 charging cables domestically.
https://www.fox.co.il/
https://www.castro.com/he
^ These kind of highstreet shops are a parallel universe (although in the last few years, they got H&M and Zara in Israel).
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Those industries, will be where they have “low worker productivity”. It’s surely not because the population has brown skin. It’s more going to be low productivity for the workers in all these small factories producing things like socks, and iPhone cables, for a small country, as if it was an island.
Israel has enough space to keep expanding the population. Problem is distribution of population is too concentrated in the center. Half of the landarea is desert in the South of Israel.
However, it’s mostly poor Mizrahi Jews and Bedouin Arabs living in Southern Israel. They’re trying to attract more high human capital to those areas – for example, they built a university in the desert called Ben-Gurion University in the poor city called Beer-Sheva.
I have not explored South of Israel much (I will next time I visit). But people who have been there, said this city Beer-Sheva is a terrible shithole, despite the Ben-Gurion University.
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Anyway, if they can build “new economy” industries in the area of Israel with lowest quality human capital, will be interesting. Perhaps Beer-sheva can transform working class, poor Mizrahi Jews and Bedouin Arabs into a cyber workforce. Or alternatively, a high-speed train could allow more normal workers to commute there from Gush Dan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QtwGA1v3VE
I am working as a software developer in Israel and earn a respectable wage that for an entry level developer would be considered really high and I guess only the US and Switzerland would pay me more compared to anywhere else in the planet(in theory at least) . And even though I could earn much more than that in the future I am still Seriously incline to emigrating because I don’t’t like Israeli culture, I don’t like the horrible work life balance in the Israeli tech sector and I don’t like living in a country with literally nothing to do or see(I find myself flying abroad 4-5 times a year because life is pretty boring in here for me). I would say that at least in the tech sector you can enjoy a high standard of living if you don’t have any problems with Israel and the Israelis like I do. If you have any questions for one of the many people in the upper 2 deciles feel free to ask.
Yes, let’s go with this.
BTW, I thought that Hungary began its Jewish quotas in the 1920s?
Have you managed to make any friends?
Beer Sheva the city is fine. I would say that a lot of people there are Russian speakers and not too many Mizrahi there as they tend to stay in the center. The university is pretty good too. I have a collaborator there. I would often go there, mostly as a stop after hiking in the desert on the weekends. The area around it with illegal (or legal but shitty) Bedouin settlements is crappy though. Each family takes up lots of land and put up containers all over the place and there is garbage all over the place. I was amused by the demolition derby (it seemed to me) that they set up when I drove close to one of those places. The Bedouin disappear completely south of Sde Boker though. Too deserty there I suppose. Maybe they can’t tap into a water pipe illegally?
The thing about Israel which made me sort of happy to leave, is that despite the good weather, not having rain and lots of plants is sort of depressing after a while. Beer Sheva has a lot less rain than the center.
I was more interested in Jewish history & culture, but let’s give some questions on Israel not very frequently discussed (the article is long, very long….so I’ve read just a part of it)
Or I’m wrong & it’s mostly Israeli propaganda?
what is astonishing is their ability to learn Hebrew (I know it is used in liturgy, but many, way too many have virtually nothing to do with it). It is not a small feat, to build a functioning society in such circumstances.
with regard to theocratic, racialist, medieval…. ways of life, there is not much to add.
for IQers- I’ve seen that many, even most of Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox children wear glasses. Since there is a correlation between myopia & high IQ- could it be that secularized religious nuts could become, after ditching silly orthodoxies, innovative scientists?
seeing perhaps 20-40 short videos on everyday life, most Israelis seem to me nationally super-conscious, optimistic, yet cautious & rather tolerant; Arabs are, on the other hand, strongly Muslim & irrational, without a trace of skepticism.
as I’ve said, their birth-rate is an absolute anomaly for a developed country. Probably demographic warfare with Arabs, but also national optimism, a sense of historical destiny which English, French…had ditched.
from what I’ve seen, they have a high level of white collar crime in various “enterprises” with Europe & US, various schemes, money laundering, something with diamonds,… so their GDP would be perhaps 10% (or more) smaller if they were more closely scrutinized.
But, the chief things remain: an able people with strong nationalist attitude & modern innovative spirit, most visibly in sciences, but also in some segments of society (gays, “race”,.)
Yeah I guess this could be another factor that we haven’t considered. Israel is a small country and all of its neighbours are poor, unstable and have much less interesting areas to explore than, say, Europe or even the US.
I guess one question is: were you born in Israel or did you make Aliyah? Or perhaps you were recruited from abroad? What countries are you looking at and why?
That isn’t surprising. It also has an equivalent nominal per capita income to France.
What’s more surprising is that the guy who insists on adjusting for PPP when talking about the size of the Russian economy (even if nominal is usually more used those comparisons) insists instead of using nominal when talking about wages (where PPP makes more sense).
Israeli wages adjusted for PPP are not great, just as its PPP-adjusted productivity isn’t.
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/guest-post-israel-9.jpg
Israel’s smart fraction does indeed do amazing work. But even it doesn’t manage to lift Israeli productivity even close to France. This doesn’t invalidate the smart fraction theory. But it does indeed complicate it for those who have bought into it blindly.
Here’s what the top two innovation indexes that I am aware of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Innovation_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Innovation_Index
FWIW, The three most innovative Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark) and Switzerland come ahead of Israel in both rankings. Israel gets to #10 in the first and is #16 in the second. Sweden is actually ranked ahead of Denmark in both of them. Ha!
I have turned around on the subject of free trade. It’s better produce your own even if it costs more. Unless something can not be acquired at all it is better to have capability to produce it your self. Long term this leads to less of low IQ people being discontent. And in case of big countries you want to be an autarky.
Interesting. It seems that Israelis are better in marketing their inventions. Just Google Israel inventions, Swedish inventions, Denmark inventions… & Israeli sites are much better organized. Scandinavians also have at least 50% of their inventions prior to WW 2.
So, Israel is very successful, but Scandinavians (and some others) are better, per capita.
This I don’t get. Israel is, for me as an outsider, a typically Mediterranean country where you can establish friendships, perhaps good food, find a type of people who are not intimidating, boring or annoying….
Of course it is not ideal, but there is no “ideal”. Anyway, it boils down to old question: do you work in order to live or do you live in order to work?
This is interesting, and an important point. It isn’t enough to have brainpower, you also need cash. Lots and lots of cash. People underestimate this a lot. There’s a similar story here in Sweden regarding startups.
How Sweden became Europe’s capital of startup exits
A choice quote from the story:
Here’s the data on the funding series:
https://i.imgur.com/S0gBC1P.jpg
However when looking at the total capital deployed Sweden still does well in a per-capita sense but Israel is just bonkers.
https://i.imgur.com/p5hLDrp.jpg
Also LOL at Norway. Seems they want to live off oil rents as long as possible.
I wonder what the break-down between native and foreign capital is in Israel. Most of the capital we have here is domestic. We have the third highest per capita amount of billionaires after Cyprus (tax haven) and Switzerland (ditto).
https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/europe-billionaires-2018.jpg
Getting data on Israel’s list of billionaires is a bit tricky. Forbes lists 21 of them in their latest index. But when looking at the Wikipedia page, it lists 41! However, Forbes doesn’t count Abramovic as Israeli, instead listing him as Russian only. There may be more such omissions. Either way, it would seem that Israel should have plenty of domestic capital to deploy.
On its surface, it would accord with stereotypes: the brash and loud Israeli with the quiet, shy but high-performing Nordics. Except that Israelis do indeed have cause to brag in specific areas. They invest more in R&D as a percentage of GDP than any all other OECD countries except one: Korea.
https://i.imgur.com/XksGiN4.jpg
Though Ben-David mentions in his paper that even this has been breached as of last year. (The latest OECD data for both Israel and Korea is 2017, but 2018 for most others).
I’ve already showed the chart with VC capital investments, whose source is this report, where Israel invested almost as much as France in total, despite 8.5X lower population.
I would be interested to see how a ranking looking at commercialisation from investments in R&D would look like. Both in terms of speed (paper put out to tangible product/service offered on the market) but also the amount of money made in, say, a 10-year time frame. My gut feeling is that Israel would probably come out ahead as #1, though it would be interesting to see actual confirmation whether that is true or not.
Then again, innovation can not always be so easily disentangled. Basic science research may take decades to come to fruition and may not always have large monetary impacts in the immediate sense. For example: mapping the university. We won’t have much practical utility for that until we become a proper space-faring civilisation, but it’s better to do it now than wait for it later. Plus science for science’s sake is important. If for no other reason than for curiosity’s sake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
I am aware of comparative advantage. What will your comparative advantage do for you when it is nationally important industry(military)? What happens when you expand it to other industries?
And we also all saw how encouraging domestic production helped Russia.
I am old -fashioned in this respect. Damn the stats, full speed ahead!
Of course any country can change its R & D capital, but what’s the result? For instance, Saudi Arabia or Qatar could easily overtake Israel & Korea, but with what result?
I want to know which type of inventions (I would leave, for a moment, theoretical exact sciences aside) a country had accomplished in past XYZ years in easily verifiable fields: medicine, various high technologies, agriculture, space exploration, applied physics (for instance, such was Ruska’s electronic microscope), AI, robotics, ecology, earth sciences, dentistry, …
And make a list of inventions. It’s easy.
Of course, without fundamental science nothing would have worked: silicon chips, computers, smartphones, lasers, semi-conductors, (not in chronological order) …are technical “consequences” of Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg & Dirac.
Interesting that you say Beer-Sheva is not the shithole, people said it was.
Although, it seems obvious the Jewish population there is very Mizrahi.
If you search schools in Beer-Sheva, and then you can see often demographic composition (I know it’s not exactly scientific).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7lv50qTNg
What kind of company do you work for (is it multinational or local company, if that is not too much of a personal question)? And you don’t have the skills to apply for equivalent position in e.g. UK/Ireland?
Data about hours and productivity, can seem like nonsense to me, although it’s promoted a lot by OECD.
For example, I like to work all day and night, but in a quite unproductive way (in between procrastinating on the internet).
So I guess I would be considered a very inefficient worker, by OECD style measurements. However, the relevant thing is the quantity of work, rather than hour many hours I was wasting on it. (Someone else may work more efficiency then me, but if they are less hours “working” then the end result is the same, and that seems the important thing).
Israel is kind of like a third world country, or recently third world country.
It’s amazing to me, the idea that they invented anything – as conditions there still seem a bit harsh and inhospitable today, and would have been extremely difficult a few years ago.
Israel is more or less the opposite of these wealthy countries (Denmark, Sweden).
That could change perhaps in the 2030s, when Israel will become more like a first world country, and feel like a less harsh, frontier place.
But Israel really for most people won’t feel like a first world country until around 2030. (Maybe Tel Aviv will finally have a metro some time in the 2030s as well – currently they are building a tram there)
My brother has been working for a few years now in America (in California actually) – and had until recently 0 American friends at all in America.
I’m working in Western Europe, and always had friends from the beginning in the two countries I was in so far.
In general, Europe is the better place to work, if you want more friendly people – there are so many other foreigners working in this sector (they are foreign workers mainly from EU countries), and these are people who are culturally very open to other foreigners. (If you have any colleagues from countries like Spain, Italy, you are invited out a lot, while in American office apparently people has their private life they don’t want to mix with colleagues)
Yeah most of them are my childhood friends and to really replace them will be impossible, But with time I became kind of successful while most of them are not so much so leaving them today would be easier than ever.
My parents made “Aliyah” in the 90’s when I was little and despite the fact that I lived pretty much my entire life in Israel I never truly felt belonged. As for the countries I looking at mostly the US because of the potential career I can make there combined with the fact that life should be better there in general and if not the states then somewhere cozy in Europe despite the fact I will probably lose money moving there.
I work in small local startup surrounded by Israeli’s brightest and I don’t feel I am inferior to anyone of my colleagues. I kinda underachieved academically in school and University and as a result I always felt I am surrounded by mediocrity but fortunately I found a job that utilizes my skills and talents and in there I realized my long life hypothesis that given the right circumstances the sky is the limit for me so in this regard I feel I can succeed wherever I go. As for relocation companies are mostly still screening resumes based or arbitrary stuff like “years of experience” and since I have only two years of experience it wont be easy for me at the moment to find a job like mine only abroad. My current short term plan is to find a good job abroad and to see how it goes from there. worst case scenario I can always go back to Israel unlike my parents who didn’t had a realistic option(90’s Russia)
Yes, but I would add that Israel seems like a dynamic national, yet diverse country. It is a new country with very different cultures, stemming from immigrants from all over the world.
Anyway, it is light years ahead of any other state in that geographical area.
Oh, I see. I was only asking because you said you had “nothing to do” in Israel. I thought maybe you moved there for work and I was wondering if the reason you found yourself bored was because you hadn’t made any friends.
I guess it might be difficult to find a replacement of your working environment (small local startup).
I don’t know about relocations companies.
I applied directly for every graduate recruitment programme (in certain Western European countries…), which are mostly open for anyone from any country.
But my salary, in the program in a very large company – this was a relatively low salary.
Visa issue is simply unpleasant – but after 5 years you can in theory apply for “long term residency”. If you can get that, then you can relax in the country, and they won’t take you out if you lose your work permit.
I feel some shock when thinking that people have been inventing things in Israel, considering what it feels like when you are in the country itself (harsh, frontier country, difficulty of transport there, lots of brown people, and lack of adequate infrastructure).
It still feels half in the third world. But it is in transition stage, where it is half in the third world and half in the first world.
Half in Africa and half in Europe.
–
By the 2030s, Israel will feel like an unambiguously first world, developed country.
It is very interesting to visit Israel now, if you want to see what this halfway transition of third world to first world looks like. (It was probably similar if you visited Japan in the 1960s).
Nowadays, Japan is unambiguously first world country. But in the 1960s and 1970s, I imagine Japan would be this mix of wealth and poverty (and Japan was actually famous for its poor infrastructure in the 1960s).
Does fear of a large middle east war drive you?
Are the children all Jewish? Do Arabs go to separate schools?
That will be a Jewish (Hebrew) school. Although there are some projects to mix Bedouin into the Jewish schools in that region.
It is clear from looking at the schools, that Beer-Sheva also has a lot of Ethiopian Jews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-vR33IRH20
Forget it.
The quality of Israeli migrants depends on the host country migrant selectivity for graduates FracHi. For Israel the brain drain of graduates is about 3.6% for year 2010. For most countries the Migrant Average Group IQ MAGIQ of Israeli on average are smarter than those average native Israeli with IQlynn=95, except for DE where on average they are less smart with MAGIQ=91.3 (FracHi < UniA). The ENIQMA is estimated with respect to IQLynn and UniA, from the bell-curve the higher the graduate percentage UniA of population the less intelligent they are.
DegDrainNdx: percentage of number of immigrant with deg over number of graduates in source country
MAGIQ: estimated Migrant Average Group IQ (estimated from bell-curves of migrants and national pop)
UniA: fraction of national population with degrees (from OECD data)
FracHi: fraction of migrants with degrees (from the respective hosts’ census)
ENIQMA: Estimated National average IQ of Graduates from Multi-Attributes
ISR: IQLynn=95, UniA=0.30, ENIGMA=102.86
Host DegDrainDex MAGIQ FracHi SrcCountry
AU: 0.20 114.485 0.781 ISR
CA: 0.62 114.266 0.776 ISR
US: 2.32 107.866 0.631 ISR
UK: 0.31 107.802 0.629 ISR
FR: 0.07 101.866 0.474 ISR
DE: 0.07 91.284 0.220 ISR
The reason I heard about why Israeli start-up culture is really successful, is that a lot of the partners meet up in the same unit in the army. Later, one of the people in the unit gets a PhD and talks to his old friends, one of whom is working in a bank and knows about getting a loan, and another one who owns a restaurant and knows about people management, and since they trusted each other with their lives back in the army (and they still regularly do reserve duty), they trust each other not to bail and do their best in the start-up.
It can’t be the reason for the majority of the start-up successes, but there is something to it. People will trust you after a while when you spend a few weeks with them, and you feel bad letting them down. There was a group of people who I had lunch with, and then started going to parties with them. Later some of them started a company, but I was definitely leaving the country by that time.
Well yes, that was what I loved about it. The part about establishing friendships easily and always finding people who were interesting and wanted to do various stuff. After five years in the States, it was like going from a dark, soul-crushing place (in terms of interactions with other humans) to something that I didn’t think existed (yes, I do need to live in more places, but don’t know if that’s possible at this point). I don’t like deserty environments, but that is not a make or break thing for me.
The non-ideal part about it is that we had to leave and that the pay is better in other countries. Plus, the number of jobs to choose from is much greater if you don’t tie yourself down to one country. Also I was always afraid of being screwed over, since Israelis talked about it constantly as part of their culture. But I think that only happens if you buy stuff from street vendors. Even in the West Bank nobody tried to screw me, but maybe they got my paranoid vibe about paying too much money.
Anyways, when you’re busy with work and family stuff, interactions with other humans your age is not the number one priority. The Internets can take the edge off of that, anytime there is a free hour to procrastinate away.
Israel has to integrate the Bedouin Arabs into the normal society.
If you ignore them, then their birthrate just escalates (currently the Bedouin in Israel have one of the highest birthrates of any population in the world – if I recall, something like 7-8 children per woman).
So the Bedouin population expands in Israel at a very rapid rate.
The key for solving the problem, is to integrate them into normal society, where women are educated – and as a result, their birthrates will fall and they will become relatively more loyal or economically useful citizens, and not some kind of Malthusian apocalypse.
–
By the way, if you want to see “peak Israeli postmodernism”, at least in their television.
Israeli army have some very postmodernist units – for example, a video about one which is including Bedouin Arab soldiers, fighting together in the same unit with the women soldiers (including one from Uruguay), and all as a combat unit.
And then the Israeli state television makes a feminist video report about this unit, as a way to condemn rabbis who say women shouldn’t be in the army.
Television is very biased there for the certain secular, ideals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOvIOBnk-wA
Israel is 74% Jewish. 10% are Haredim. So if 20% of the population is doing most of the heavy lifting does that mean even most secular Jews are laggards who are not contributing much?
How much racism is there against Ethiopian Jews?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/world/middleeast/ethiopian-israeli-protests-racism.html
Ethiopian Jews are not like the African Americans who have generations of modernization and adjustment to life in a developed country.
They are also not like more sophisticated, educated and urban Ethiopian Christian population.
Jews came from isolated villages in the jungle, who were apparently almost at stone age level of society even for African standard.
You can read that Jews were the most isolated and uneducated peasants of Ethiopia, and not comparable to urbanized Christian Ethiopians from cities like Addis Ababa.
–
If we look at the fact that half of Ethiopian-Israeli soldiers in the Israeli army, go to military prison.
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/idf-to-tackle-ethiopian-soldiers-prison-problem/
There is very high difficulty of adjusting to basic rules of first world country.*
Well Israel is not exactly first world, and is still half way in the third world. But, it’s in a transitioning process to becoming first world country, and population have to follow some normal rules or discipline.
Haredim (“ultra-Orthodox Jews”) are 12% of Israeli population.
National Religious Jews (“Orthodox Jews”) are 10% of the Israeli population.
Masorti Jews (“traditional Jews”, mainly from the Middle East) – are 27% of the Israeli population.
Secular Jews – it’s around 25% of the population.
Muslims – are around 20% of Israelis.
And then -“other” (Druze/Christian, etc) – maybe 5-6% of Israeli citizens.
It doesn’t completely correlate to productivity, as National Religious Jews are supposedly the most economically productive sector, according to statistics. (While the “traditional Jews” category, will include a lot of proletariat).
That’s interesting. Would it be analogous to ‘modern Orthodox’ in the US? Also, I’ve read that apparently Arab Christians do well socio-economically. Do they do better than this group?
How ethnically mixed is the youngest generation of secular Jews and nationally religious? Will that cause a drop in their ability to contribute economically / carry the rest of society?
Look, obviously it depends on the place and job, and your age and maybe personal circumstances. Obviously if someone tells you that all Americans are fat, and then you go to Washington DC and walk around Silver Spring or Georgetown, then you will say that that person was lying. Also if you maybe go to Seattle and make some good friends there and go out on the weekends for craft beer, your experience will be positive. And it’s true that when I first moved to the US I was really outgoing for the first year and had a few girlfriends, until the work started crushing me a bit. Maybe I just got unlucky, but the turnaround in circumstances and its sustained continuity was just too radical upon the move to Israel.
At least there people seemed to believe me when I said I spoke a foreign language. There was one particular story from a happy hour at work in the US that I remember, that would never happen in Israel. There was some girl who kind of hated me and I was telling everyone a story about how I tutor German on the weekends a bit, and then she said: ‘You’re a liar. You don’t even know how to speak German probably’. That was so shocking and didn’t compute at all, that I couldn’t think of what to say for the next five seconds before finally saying ‘Well, yes it can seem that way since I speak English fluently and without an accent, but there is no one else here who speaks German so I can’t really prove it to you. I mean, I could say a sentence, but it could be completely made up from mumbles.’ No one said anything for the next 10 seconds so I continued ‘You heard me speak Russian to my girlfriend who’s from there, so you know that I can speak at least one other language, so why do you not believe that I could potentially speak German?’ ‘Why don’t you go back to Russia then?’ ‘I’m not from Russia… I can’t really go back there.’ That’s one of the instances where I clearly remembered that I decided I need to get the hell out of this county; I’m surrounded by idiots. In Israel if you tell someone you speak a foreign language they dismiss it as useful background information.
Well, I must admit: it is astoundingly idiotic. I just don’t know what to say.
Rootless cosmopolitans, that’s it. Not Jews or Israelis, but age group from 15 to 35-40 in most Western countries.
From what I’ve read & seen, many young (20-30) gifted white people now share these characteristics:
Is there a “cure” or this is just s shift to another type of civilization- or dystopian collapse, I don’t know.
what about outside of the military? are Ethiopians 10x over represented in prisons?
I guess 50% of Ethiopian Jewish soldiers are put in military jail in Israel, not because they are criminals, but because they do not follow rules, like going to base at the beginning of the week.
It’s some simple peasants, living in countryside of Ethiopia.
(Although the roads look surprisingly good?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt4_DvVXr9g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc_3VT2TsZU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp2KbvXzifM
–
We talk about Israel as being like a third world country.
But Israelis still have to pass exams, write a CV, wake up at the same time in the morning and go to the office on time (even if they are famous for being late), follow traffic rules. It’s not like life in an isolated village in the Ethiopian countryside.
I think probably quite analogous are the Mormons of Utah?
These “national religious” people in Israel are a weird cult, but which has generally adapted to life in the modern economy and have a bourgeois work ethic.
However, unlike Mormons, this National Religious sector is much more multiracial, and has mix of white, brown and even some black (Ethiopian) people.
They still mainly do not go to the army, live in chaotic villages, and supposedly avoid taxes.
So I’m not sure they would be classified as productive overall.
They would be potentially loyal citizens however, if their housing situation was changed.
–
Arab Christians mainly live as a minority inside Muslim villages, and there for can’t easily volunteer for the army, as it would anger the majority of their Muslim neighbours.
On the other hand, Druze and Circassians live in their own separate isolated villages, and their men have the highest military service rates in Israel.
–
Israel should have built separate villages for the Christian Arabs and moved them there in the 1950s, and then would have easily joined the army (but Israel is too much of a weak and “free” country for that).
http://www.thetower.org/article/christians-in-the-holy-land-dont-call-us-arabs/
And it seems like some other Arabs are copying that idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWlq4fQWJQs
National Religious sector I think might be majority Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) origin in Israel, overall, across the whole country.
But they always look like a mix of different races – here in Jerusalem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eMMghCWnMs
I don’t think the economic contribution is determined mainly by the racial group, in this case, but rather by their cultural orientation.
And with Israel, as whole, its economically unproductive sectors are result of being isolated from the world economy, rather than their brown skin.
For workers in the factory producing Israeli iPhone 4 cables or Israeli neck scarves, I don’t see how the probable low productivity is not just a result of trade position and policy
On real estate prices: Jews like Chinese are inborn compulsive savers. Some savings will inevitably flow into the real estate market. There just isn’t a way Israel will ever not have high prices compared to incomes. And China is the same, with near-NYC prices in major city centers but incomes 75% lower.
On skilled emigration, Israel is ultimately a small country on the periphery of the civilized West. To really worry about skilled emigration rates, I’d want to see that they are worse than Arkansas, Finland, Bulgaria, Ireland, and other small to medium size peripheral jurisdictions.
“that recategorize themselves as being not Arabs, but Arameans”
This is a wonderful trend that makes me feel very happy to hear about. I hope both the Israeli government and American Christians support this movement.
So an increase in antisemitism in countries like the U.S. would actually help Israel if it reversed these emigration patterns (but wasn’t enough to change American foreign policy)?
The population of Israeli 1st graders who are not Arab/Haredi is 56%. We need to establish a Kabbalistic task force to investigate the parallels between this and the “le 56% face” meme in America. God is trying to tell us something, if we have the ears to listen.
Updated to use IQdb instead of IQlynn for percent of graduates emigrated %DegEmigrate 2010.
SrcCountry=ISR, IQdb=90.99, UniA=0.3, ENIGMA=98.9 #Israel
Host | %DegDrain | MAGIQ | FracHi | SrcCountry
US | 2.32 | 103.9 | 0.63 | ISR
CA | 0.62 | 110.3 | 0.78 | ISR
UK | 0.31 | 103.8 | 0.63 | ISR
AU | 0.2 | 110.5 | 0.78 | ISR
DE | 0.07 | 87.3 | 0.22 | ISR
%DegEmigrate = 3.8
SrcCountry=EST, IQdb=101.42, UniA=0.242, ENIGMA=111.9 #Estonia
Host | %DegDrain | MAGIQ | FracHi | SrcCountry
US | 33.61 | 116.3 | 0.61 | EST
FI | 3.6 | 102.2 | 0.26 | EST
NZ | 1.57 | 104.8 | 0.32 | EST
SE | 1.46 | 107.2 | 0.38 | EST
CA | 1.25 | 118.2 | 0.66 | EST
%DegEmigrate = 43.06 <<—
SrcCountry=BEL, IQdb=99.59, UniA=0.165, ENIGMA=114.2 #Belgium
Host | %DegDrain | MAGIQ | FracHi | SrcCountry
FR | 2.07 | 111.0 | 0.42 | BEL
US | 0.99 | 121.2 | 0.68 | BEL
CA | 0.86 | 121.2 | 0.68 | BEL
UK | 0.65 | 118.9 | 0.62 | BEL
ES | 0.55 | 104.6 | 0.26 | BEL
%DegEmigrate = 7.46
SrcCountry=FIN, IQdb=99.7, UniA=0.239, ENIGMA=110.3 #Finland
Host | %DegDrain | MAGIQ | FracHi | SrcCountry
SE | 2.69 | 98.4 | 0.21 | FIN
US | 0.88 | 120.0 | 0.74 | FIN
CA | 0.73 | 116.1 | 0.65 | FIN
UK | 0.72 | 118.7 | 0.71 | FIN
DE | 0.39 | 109.2 | 0.47 | FIN
%DegEmigrate = 6.8
SrcCountry=DNK, IQdb=98.72, UniA=0.274, ENIGMA=107.7 #Denmark
Host | %DegDrain | MAGIQ | FracHi | SrcCountry
US | 1.19 | 114.8 | 0.68 | DNK
CA | 0.92 | 115.2 | 0.69 | DNK
UK | 0.88 | 113.3 | 0.64 | DNK
SE | 0.73 | 99.4 | 0.29 | DNK
DE | 0.51 | 107.6 | 0.5 | DNK
%DegEmigrate = 5.86
SrcCountry=RUS, IQdb=95.28, UniA=0.269, ENIGMA=104.5 #Russia
Host | %DegDrain | MAGIQ | FracHi | SrcCountry
CA | 0.15 | 120.9 | 0.86 | RUS
DE | 0.14 | 100.0 | 0.38 | RUS
FR | 0.04 | 107.9 | 0.59 | RUS
UK | 0.04 | 119.3 | 0.84 | RUS
AU | 0.03 | 112.3 | 0.7 | RUS
%DegEmigrate = 0.51
Cool! Have you written up your method anywhere? What is the source of your data?
Pop quiz: what fraction of Israeli GDP does this “free stuff” account for?
Israel GDP = 350.9 billion USD (2017)
United States annual aid to Israel = 3 billion
it is less than 1%
But by Mr. “neutral” (a Giraldi fan) in above post 26 …. It can only exist as a parasite state, turn this off and Israel would really be a shithole, which is why they are so absolutely terrified about BDS.
The Brain Drain data are from IAB which are supposed to be the aggregation from various countries’ census data,
http://www.iab.de/en/daten/iab-brain-drain-data.aspx
Some data from World Bank, some directly from the country’s census data. The data timing might be out, like China the pop graduate rate is changing fast but the emigration data are from 2010. Those involve IQ values involve many assumptions and I am not quite satisfy with them yet.
The IAB data are basically incoming immigrant data. So unless the host countries are developed countries there are no outgoing emigrant data and the view is only one sided. Estonia is not as bad as it look with reasonable incoming from other countries but the demographics sure is changing fast. HongKong is definitely a basket case,
SrcCountry=HongKong, IQdb=106.27, UniA=0.172, ENIGMA=120.5
Host | IqDrainNdx | %DegDrain | MAGIQ | FracHi
CA | 14.26 | 12.58 | 129.5 | 0.73
US | 11.41 | 10.07 | 128.1 | 0.69
AU | 3.45 | 3.05 | 129.7 | 0.73
UK | 3.35 | 2.95 | 117.2 | 0.41
NL | 0.22 | 0.2 | 110.6 | 0.26
IqDrainNdxTotal = 32.9%, %DegDrainTotal = 29.02%
Amerimutts hate Russia since looking at the bear makes them see how degenerate they are.
In US$ terms, the salaries paid by Israel’s high tech sector and universities and the higher levels of the public service are similar to the US and Europe. In fact, Israeli hi-tech attracts Diaspora Jews. And there is a constant two-way movement over the ocean which is only natural when an air ticket is so inexpensive.
The overall effect of living among an increasingly third-world level population is an open question. In my opinion, the contrast today is much less than in the early years of Israel, when European immigrants were forced to mix with barefoot Yemenis and cave dweller Moroccans. Today Israel is wealthy enough to provide education and compensatory social transfer payments to create an egalitarian environment.
The bad trends described in the article do exist, yet the country is holding nicely, thank you. How it will develop in the future, that is unknowable. If you ask me, American and French Jewry will immigrate in mass, as the Russian did, and they will lift us even higher.
BDS is nothing compared with the universal boycott we suffered when Arab oil embargo terrified the world. I was managing a WWTP and nobody would sell us machinery. At last I succeeded in engaging a Dutch company. The Dutch people is special, courageous, the very best.
Israel’s prodigious theft of American tech is the best explanation.
^ Conspiracy theories just self-contradict in the most pure way with the situation in the industry.
Every time startups are exiting, purchasing American company is acquiring tech from that startup.
Main characteristic of the industry in Israel, is small startups are exiting, but few large companies are forming to capitalize on the ideas – so the main money often misses Israel, as they sell the technology to the large American companies, who then capitalize on it.
Flow of technology is from small Israeli companies, to the large companies they exit to, and which capitalize on the technology, while Israeli company disbands, and the employees start over (if they don’t emigrate).
You are saying that large American companies are expending billions of dollars, to buy technology, every few months, from small startups in the Middle East – but this technology they are buying is American, and was somehow stolen from America?
If it’s American, then why would American companies need to buy it from the Middle East?
Or Intel buys Mobileye, to buy American technology? But why would the American technology not be in America?
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Another characteristic of Israeli hi-tech scene, is they always exit too early, and often are resold later by the foreign company who purchased them.
The news this week is about sale of Clicksoftware for $1,3 billion. But Israeli owners already sold it for $438 in 2015 to American owners, who have a large profit by “flipping” it a few years later.
Typical of the Israeli industry, is losing opportunities.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/08/08/why-salesforce-is-buying-clicksoftware.html
Except opposite trend is happening.
“French” Jews (actually mainly they are Moroccans who moved to France in the 1950s) – have the highest rate of leaving Israel after they arrive.
And their rate of arrival to Israel itself declines constantly.
Why would they suddenly change their behaviour?
For example, in 2018 – Israel receives 28,000 new citizens through “Law of Return”. 78,2% were from Russian/Ukraine/Europe. 15.3% were from North/Central/South America. 5.2% from Asia and Oceania, and 1,3% from Africa.
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American immigration to Israel, is low in absolute numbers, and tiny in proportional ones. Moreover, it declines.
If we look at the trend for 2019, immigration to Israel is becoming even more purely dependent on Russia:
Naaah. Since I worked in one of the best research universities in the world there, and I had lots of contacts with industry, and someone wanted me to come and work at one major international company’s research center, I disagree. Way more drive to start a company in Israel and to take chance in basic research than in the States, maybe Boston excepted. Plus, young Israeli PhD science students are less interested into going into financial wizardry than Americans of the same age. There are plenty of Israelis also working at American companies (also in the States), and Intel probably does most of their research in its Israel research park. All the physicists postdocs were looking at it as one of their options.
Are those who come from Russia even Jews though? There was one river that I went to hike in pretty often in the Golan on the weekends, as there you can stop at some pools and swim in them, and one time there were some recent immigrants from Russia there too. The oldest guy looked like he was a character from one of those Russian mafia movies with Vigo Mortennson and he had a giant cross on him. My Hebrew was waaaaay better than theirs and they told me they were there for only one year, and by that time I was there for three years but I also had a job to do instead of just studying the language. When they got there, the mafia guy told the whole group (a few girls and another shifty looking guy) that now they will pray. And then they all prayed in Russian and said “thank you Jesus for letting us get to this spot safely”, etc… It’s not a simple hike since you have to climb a bit on some rocks, but by no means difficult. You have to be really religious to thank Jesus for that in my opinion. Anyways, I can’t believe that they gave those people Israeli passports right away, and basically told me and my wife to go screw ourselves.
I saw data somewhere that said that the vast majority of Russian immigrants are not Jews and are basically like those people. Maybe the religious mafia guy was one quarter Jewish, which qualifies him under the law of return, and he brought his whole family with him who also automatically get passports through him.
Israel uses “Law of Return”, so that someone with a Jewish grandparent, can apply for citizenship.
(However, Judaism passed from the mother. So in reality, you need 1 grandparent with a Jewish mother – so only one Jewish great-grandparent if they are correct gender)
Finally, Israel allows permanent residences for the parents of both the husband and the wife, if they have retired.
So the law on family re-unification with parents, is probably one of the things which creates the “Russian/Soviet ghetto” atmosphere in some places. (E.g. Lod, Krayot, etc)
Many thousands of elderly non-Jewish family members, immigrated to Israel, because one of their children in law, or children had a Jewish grandparent.
These old people will not learn Hebrew, and they just seem to be there to import some Soviet atmosphere.
.
But if you write this on the immigration form, you will be banned from immigration to Israel.
However, obviously, a motive for going to Kinneret area or Golan Heights for many people, will be Jesus – especially as these areas are economically not very inspiring. Attractive countryside and religion is the only attraction there.
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Think about how economically depressed Tiberias looks (I have to say, I thought the city was a shit hole when I visited).
Why would you even want to immigrate to place like that and live in some slum buildings, where there are few jobs?
A motive for some of the immigrants to that area, must surely be Jesus, as it is his part of the country. If you believe in Jesus, then Tiberias is probably a very cool city to live, since you are basically in his home area, where he did most of his “miracles”. But if you don’t care about Jesus, then Tiberias is just some poor city in an attractive nowhere place, where most slum buildings will probably collapse in the next earthquake.
I think a Jewish grandparent on father’s side is also ok – Israel adopted the Nazis definition of who is a Jew iirc.