

The Tel Aviv Cluster - uuilly
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opinion/12brooks.html?

======
defen
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.

~~~
patio11
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.

~~~
m0th87
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>

------
tokenadult
"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.

~~~
Xichekolas
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.

------
mynameishere
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...](http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-
stein19-2008dec19,0,4676183.column)

 _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._

~~~
dejb
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?

------
mangodrunk
"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.

~~~
tezza
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

------
Maro
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.)

~~~
ido
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).

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

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

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

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

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

[3]
[http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2008/sb20080...](http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2008/sb2008012_744161.htm)

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

------
fjabre
_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.

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

~~~
fjabre
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...

