How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/how-did-israel-become-start-up-nation/

by cwan • 17 years ago

35 39 17 years ago

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

Icterus• 17 years ago

One partial explanation which intrigues me, from the "what you can't say" files:

Historically (e.g. medieval times) the priesthood drew many of most intelligent/academic segment the population, as a compelling alternative to manual labor.

Beginning in the 4th century, Christian priesthood adopted celibacy, which later was made mandatory by the Roman Catholic Church, which sought to prevent inheritance from draining its coffers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celibate#Christianity

Meanwhile, Jewish Rabbis have been encouraged to marry and bring up children throughout this history.

Over centuries, you get a selective drift which results in a different distribution of intelligence among the populations. This explains in part the statistical incidence of academic achievement in the jewish population: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews#Achievements

Note that I'm speaking here of statistical measures. There are plenty of dumb jews, just as non-jews. But thousands of years of policy from the Catholic church has led to a population shift which has excluded many of the historically most academic in nature from procreating over 25 - 50 generations.

An explanation I first came across in Nozick's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia

andreshb2• 17 years ago

Never thought about it like that, it's a rather interesting explanation, but there is one assumption there:

That the most intelligent of the population would continue to choose priesthood event after celibacy was made mandatory by the Roman Catholic Church.

Perhaps the most intelligent of the population did not continue to choose the path of celibacy over and over again for 25-50 generations.

lallysingh• 17 years ago

Hmm, I think that guys with bigger brains aren't as driven by their libidos.

philwelch• 17 years ago

As much as I like the "Ashkenazi Jews are a genetically smarter population" hypothesis, it's not sufficient to explain what's going on. It's probably necessary that some level of intelligence exists within a population for startups to happen, but it's probably a vanishingly small part of the equation.

Zarathu3• 17 years ago

Not only does it not explain why there are so many Israeli startups, but it's a false hypothesis altogether. Aside from the fact that IQ is more a representation of adaptation to modernity than intelligence, there are many environmental factors that come into play.

There would probably be more startups in the Arab population if they weren't so discriminated against in the country.

rkts2• 17 years ago

The combination of IQ and "chutzpah" is the essence of the entrepreneurial personality. If Jews are (for whatever reason) disposed to be high on these traits, it's certainly a sufficient explanation.

rkts2• 17 years ago

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

Sigh ... let's think a bit about how speculative, ad-hoc genetic explanations for cultural achievements get traction if they spin the right way...

Can there really be evidence that the genetically similar brothers and relatives of Christian priests weren't helped by their siblings status? Can we show that priests had a disproportionate amount of the intelligence genes of the Christian population to begin with? Can we show that converted Jews (like my ancestors) didn't skew the results? Can we show, even, that priest didn't actually reproduce quite freely through the behind-the-scenes-hanky-panky they were famous for? The list could go on and on. Jeesh!

andreshb2• 17 years ago

I'd like to see more "chutzpah" examples outside of the usual US+Europe+Israel arena.

Eliezer• 17 years ago

I should write sometime about the rationalist virtue of chutzpah, since I just now realized that this has been a major driving factor in my life.

smanek3• 17 years ago

"From the age of zero we [Israelis] are educated to challenge the obvious, ask questions, debate everything"

Why do you think they don't question their religion?

Alex3917• 17 years ago

What do you mean 'their' religion? Israel is made up of people from all different religions, and on average people over there are much less religious than in the US.

endtime4• 17 years ago

Most Jewish* Israelis live secular lives. Not sure where you get the idea that they don't question religion.

*1.5 million Israelis are Arab Muslims.

condor2• 17 years ago

"Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. From 1976-2004, Israel was the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, having recently been supplanted by Iraq. Since 1985, the United States has provided nearly $3 billion in grants annually to Israel."

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

I can imagine that has some trick-down effects on the "financing of ideas"-side of the equation. Smart people are one thing, smart people with a lot of resources, another.

endtime4• 17 years ago

The vast majority of that has been military aid, at least 76% of which has been required to be spent in the US, IIRC.

condor2• 17 years ago

Agreed, it looks like the breakdown for '49-07 is $53B military $30B economic. I have no idea how that was committed etc., but it shouldn't be discounted the unique position Israel has been on the US Aid side, and what affect that could have on spurring economic (and start-up) growth for a nation of 7MM people. That shouldn't take away anything from the qualitative characteristics mentioned in the article, just another data point.

wheels2• 17 years ago

This is somewhat misleading on several points:

- They're working with some other definition of startup than we're accustomed to. CrunchBase, for example, has 581 listings within 20 miles of London, and 35 within 20 miles of Tel Aviv.

- The Israeli tech startup world seems to kind of be in the shitter right now relative to its heyday in the first web boom. There's a shift of VC out of Israel and into China at this point.

- The whole blah, blah military -- there are lots of countries with compulsory conscription that don't have a lot of startups.

I think the only thing I really agree with is the general sentiment: national culture greatly affects people's inclination towards opportunism. No culture of opportunism, not many startups.

endtime4• 17 years ago

>They're working with some other definition of startup than we're accustomed to.

Or CrunchBase isn't a definitive listing. Isn't it feasible that an English-language site will have less complete information from countries where the main language isn't English?

wheels2• 17 years ago

It's probable, in fact, but even so, Tel Aviv is also way behind Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Munich, Barcelona, ...

Note that most Israeli tech businesses have to be international players. The Israeli market itself is tiny.

known• 17 years ago

Israelis cannot resist trying to help their fellow man. This often takes the form of meddling, and can even be mistaken for rudeness. They will interfere in someone else's conversation on the street to offer some good-hearted advice; they will read the newspaper in the hands of the man sitting next to them on the bus and proceed to ask him not to turn the pages so fast; they will never allow a fellow Israeli to fix his car by himself, even against protest

http://www.ovalbooks.com/xeno/Israelis.html

hop3• 17 years ago

Considering theres only about 13 million Jewish people in the world, they are disproportionately successful. Top of the Forbes 400, correct me if I'm wrong -

1 William Gates III, Athiest/Agnostic

2 Warren Buffett, Athiest/Agnostic

3 Lawrence Ellison, Jewish

4 Christy Walton & family, Inheritance

5 Jim C. Walton, Inheritance

6 Alice Walton, Inheritance

7 S. Robson Walton, Inheritance

8 Michael Bloomberg, Jewish

9 Charles Koch, ?

9 David Koch, ?

11 Sergey Brin, Jewish

11 Larry Page, ?

13 Michael Dell, Jewish

14 Steven Ballmer, Jewish

15 George Soros, Athiest, but Jewish by blood

16 Donald Bren, ?

17 Paul Allen, Athiest/Agnostic

17 Abigail Johnson, Inheritance

19 Forrest Edward Mars, Inheritance

19 Jacqueline Mars

19 John Mars, Inheritance

22 Carl Icahn, Jewish

23 Ronald Perelman, Jewish

24 George B. Kaiser, Jewish

25 Philip Knight, Athiest/Agnostic

26 Sheldon Adelson, Jewish

26 Anne Cox Chambers, Inheritance

28 Jeffrey Bezos, Jewish

29 James Simons, Jewish

30 Dan Duncan, ?

30 Edward C. Johnson III, Inheritance

32 Jack Crawford Taylor, ?

33 James Goodnight, ?

33 John Paulson, ?

35 John Kluge, ?

36 Steven Cohen, ?

37 Philip Anschutz, Evangelical Christian

37 Rupert Murdoch, Christian

39 Harold Hamm, Christian

40 Pierre Omidyar, ?

40 Eric Schmidt, ?

42 Eli Broad, Jewish

43 Steve Jobs, Buddhist?

44 Len Blavatnik, ?

44 David Geffen, Jewish

jganetsk• 17 years ago

Jeff Bezos is not Jewish. Steven Cohen is probably Jewish. But yeah, you are right.

kingkilr• 17 years ago

Why do some people have their religion listed (or atheist/agnostic) but others have inheritance?

jraines• 17 years ago

If inheritance is a religion, I want to convert.

hop3• 17 years ago

They aren't "successful", just won an ovarian lottery. Skews the data.

joubert2• 17 years ago

What does this list have to do with the article? I don't really understand what you're trying to say here.

nandemo• 17 years ago

Er, Israel is a mainly Jewish country. He's suggesting that being Jewish might be correlated to entrepreneurial success.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

Cuz it's easy to make a lot of money when you're in finance and in Western civilization, Jewish culture got started way ahead of Christian culture on finance.

Blame the Papacy.

mun411• 17 years ago

As long as there is government and cultural support any country can be a 'start up nation'. Israel fits that description.

How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?

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