How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#2One 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
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#3I'd like to see more "chutzpah" examples outside of the usual US+Europe+Israel arena.
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#4I 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.
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#5One 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 i…
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.
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#6One 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 i…
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.
Hmm, I think that guys with bigger brains aren't as driven by their libidos.
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#7One 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 i…
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.
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#8I 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.
"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?
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#9I 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.
"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?
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.
Re: How Did Israel Become the “Start-Up Nation”?
#10"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.