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The Tel Aviv Cluster

nytimes.com

54 pointsuuilly27 comments

I considered rewriting his first two paragraphs, replacing "Jews" with "whites" and updating the numbers accordingly, but then thought better of it. Instead I will offer this:

Broooks quotes Steven L. Pease "The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based."

1) While I acknowledge the importance of learning in Judaism, I find it a bit odd to claim that a religion with 613 commandments is not "rite-based"

2) These were the same values of the original Puritan settlers in New England - in fact they even saw themselves as modern day Israelites, chosen by God to go into an unknown land and build a city upon a hill. They rejected the Catholic rituals of the Anglican church, and to this day Boston is a city whose message is "you should be smarter." (http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html) Furthermore, U.S. progressivism grew out of the Unitarian church at Harvard and the Transcendentalists, both in New England.

Essentially all appeals to culture as an explanation are "X does Y, because they do. We have no convincing explanation at to why, but ??? is unsatisfying so we're putting down the reason as 'culture'." For this argument at much greater length, see "Making Common Sense of Japan", which is sadly out of print. (I go back and forth on how much stock I put in it.)

Speaking of which: if book learning and rejection of religious rites makes startups, then you all should be working for Japan, China, or Russia by now, and I should be getting drunk or whatever it is us papists do when not steeping ourselves in dogma. ;) This of course invites the cultural non-explanation: well, granted we did just say that book learning mattered, but there is another offsetting feature of Japanese/Chinese/Russian culture which means it doesn't quite work for them. Oh, except you've got stats which say that Japan actually does have a lot of startups? No problem -- it's what you would expect given their culture and all.

This reminds me of Nassim Taleb's piece about his discussion on the Black Swan theory[1] with an Italian colleague. The colleague argues that he would not have come up with the theory had he grown up in a Protestant culture because of its Platonic tendencies. Suffice it to say, Taleb uses hard evidence to prove such causality doesn't exist.

In Outliers[2], Malcolm Gladwell shows why Jewish lawyers tend to be more successful. A few decades ago, it was difficult for Jews to find work at the top Wall Street firms because of the WASP[3] tradition. So instead they established their own firms and handled work that the WASP firms refused to touch, such as corporate takeovers. This work later became big in the 80's, and the Jewish firms were the ones that had all the experience, so the money went there.

It would be easy (and naive) to attribute the success of Jewish lawyers to their cultural heritage, but Gladwell's explanation is much more convincing, and he actually uses data to back his assertions up. I do think culture influences mindsets, but I also think it's practically impossible to discover how it does so. Arguments like the author's are absurd. However, it is fascinating how successful Jews tend to be overall, as pointed out in the article. I wonder what alternative explanations there are.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant

Agreed that it's impossible to come up with a single concrete, satisfying answer to these questions. However we're not building a criminal case - it's more of a civil case, where the side with the preponderance of evidence wins. In that vein, two books that I found enjoyable were "Albion's Seed" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed) which details how cultural differences in four areas of England manifested themselves in colonial America, with cultural consequences to this day; and "A Farewell to Alms" (http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet...) which attempts to explain why England was the first country to escape the "Malthusian Trap", enabling the industrial revolution.

I wonder if you've read Roy Andrew Miller's "Japan's modern myth: the language and beyond" and what you thought of it. I know next to nothing about Japan and the Japanese, but I was very much impressed by this book when I read it a few years ago, and its approach to some of Japan's myths seems to resonate with how "Making Common Sense of Japan" is described.

The Jewish tradition may be learning-based, but it's ideas about learning are extremely deferential & scholastic way. A Jewish scholar can quote sages the debates that they had.

If I had to use common sense to guess what a traditional Jewish education would qualify for, I would guess lawyers.

Anyway, this is all very theoretical. Most Jews do not receive a traditional Jewish education and most of those in the Tel Aviv startup scene are probably at least 2nd generation seculars or more.

The article overlooked something that I think is important: Israelis have a culture that fosters a strong competitive spirit. However, it's not the sort of competitive spirit that encourages lone-wolf style thinking - they're excellent team players.

I think that a lot of the traits that you get from living in a place that requires you to always be ready to fight like hell for survival leak into everything else.

I agree[1] with "most of those in the Tel Aviv startup scene are probably at least 2nd generation seculars or more."

When I was in Israel there were quite a few flavours of Israeli securalism. There is quite a strong communist sentiment here, a neo-agrarian sentiment there. Non jewish stuff abounds with a lot of Humanism and the ultimate fence sitting home base of Bahá'í Faith[2]

------------

[1] I don't esp agree with the first statement. The scolasticism you describe seems to be referring to Hasidic-Yeshiva type Jewish Education. My personal Jewish upbringing was quite removed from that, but theres so few of us we also know the Yeshiva types well. From my experience of that style I would say that Yeshivites would yield less of the top rolecall that seems to be the evidence trotted out by this article.

[2] Based in Haifa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith

"Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined."

That's why the submitted article is Hacker News. The yeah, buts later in the article are an interesting analysis of what can endanger start-up-friendly places.

I wish they would compare per-capita numbers on a city by city basis. Since startups tend to congregate in certain cities, the per-capita numbers for whole countries don't really tell you much. In this case, the Bay Area is about twice as populous as Tel Aviv, but the US is about 40 times more populous than Israel, making that national per-capita figure kind of meaningless.

In 2008, Physics Nobel laureate David Gross gave a talk at Technion [1] and mentioned that this belief that Jews are smarter is dangerous, as it may give Israelis the impression that its accomplishments are God-given, and not due to hard work.

Personally, I found this article somewhat weak. I think [2]-[4] are more informative.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNmZqH01nX0

[2] http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/how-did-isr...

[3] http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2008/sb20080...

[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7654780.stm

"The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability."

I don't think this is the case. But as he has given no evidence for such claims I will not bother giving any evidence.

Is not much of Israel's success not from economic assistance from the US and the Jewish diaspora? As a welfare state, Israel hasn't done too bad but I don't think it has excelled at all in any measurable way in technology. Most of these startups are based on contingencies set by military aid given by the US to Israel. As others have stated, speaking about start up companies (are they even successful?) per capita doesn't make much sense when you're comparing countries that are as diversified as much as the US and as large.

"It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq."

And?

"Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined."

Well, France and Germany don't have large groups of people living outside sending money into the country for whatever reason.

"Some oil-rich states spend billions trying to build science centers. But places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv are created by a confluence of cultural forces, not money."

So now Tel Aviv should be comparable to Silicon Valley? Isn't the article supposed to be persuading us to believe this?

"The surrounding nations do not have the tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity."

I guess he's never read a history book. Is he speaking about recent history?

"For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652."

How many of those patents are military related? Yes, we know that Egypt and Saudi Arabia are not the pinnacle of innovation. Wow, look how many more patents Israel has compared to the whole of Africa.

The article is particularly light fluff. But your counterpoints miss the mark considerably.

. * Nasdaq Listings: Noteworthy. How many UK firms are there?

. * Military Patents: What is less meaningful to you with them being military related?

. * Outsde Captial flows from Diaspora:

You seem to think captial flows collected in the diaspora go into some big venture fund. It doesn't. It goes to ambulances [with labels on the side telling you which country donated] and other equipment.

Some portion of diaspora donation goes to those crazed fanatic settlers who are nothing but trouble. But those settlers are funded through side channels of existing relationships to idealogically similar diaspora members.

What is more worrying about the diaspora is that they produce some of the crazy settlers in the first place, who arrive from outside to Israel ready to cause problems

This point has been made many times before, eg. by Feynman in Surely You're Joking, where he points out that jewish people seem to value and encourage education more than other groups. For balance, he also shares an anecdote where jewish students ask him whether pushing the button on the elevator should be considered work [a question Feynman considers ridiculous], which is forbidden on Saturday in the jewish religion. (The two stories may not be told together by Feynman, I don't remember.)

I think what they asked him was if electricity is the same as fire, which he then started to explain only to be disappointed that they asked it just to determine if using the elevator is work (apparently starting a fire is work, or something like that).

A tangent: some elevators in Israel have special programming that causes them to open their doors automatically on every floor during the Sabbath (and Yom Kippur). That way you can get up and downstairs without ever having to push a button.

I guess Brooks knows his audience but it's generally not a good idea to write things like this. Another example:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein19...

I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

What's your point? Is it that we shouldn't publicly talk about some statistics for fear that people might draw the 'wrong conclusions'. What if Stein was right and 'Jews' actually did run Hollywood? (BTW I really don't know or care) Would that be a piece of information that should reflexively suppressed?

Well, humor may be misleading and easily misunderstood, but this article is not a scientific paper, and the rules of which things look better and which don't are different.

That's pretty funny.

All joking aside, a disproportionately high percentage of the Hollywood studio system is in fact Jewish, and for historical reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_film#The_studio_sys...

This happened a lot in the early 20th century: certain immigrant groups ended up dominating certain industries. That need not be cause for offense.

I think this is a quite disturbing article, comparing religious belonging to some sort of intellectual superiority.

This article sounds like the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon extolling the many virtues of tigers.

What do you mean? David Brooks isn't Israeli, is he?

Hobbes is not a tiger either, is he? :-D

During a decade of grim foreboding, Israel has become an astonishing success story, but also a highly mobile one.

- That pretty much sums it up for me. I'm totally convinced. You guys?

Honestly though if we're going to post politically charged articles to HN can we at least get some from more respected columnists like Seymour Hersh or Thomas Friedman.

If these two are more respectful, I say let's better stay away from "political charged" articles entirely.

Oh please. He's quoting patent numbers from Egypt and Saudi Arabia and comparing it to Israel.. It's like comparing US patent numbers to Mexico.. Are you kidding me..?

And he praises their prime minister Netanyahu for being an optimist. Netanyahu is a pretty controversial figure to say the least, even amongst Israelis.

Is it any surprise this is an Op-Ed piece?

EDIT: So a theocracy mired in civil war and at the center of so much religious and cultural tension on a global scale is a success story comparable to Silicon Valley? Yeah, great article...

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