Israel has been doing very well throughout the world-wide economic crisis of the past two years. My theory is that there are many factors holding Israel back that will continue to be relevant and have some effect (e.g. the political/military situation), but the critical factor is Israel’s history of socialism. Israel has been moving away from socialism since 1985, and the process seems to have passed critical mass in 2003. I think that Israel’s current economic success is due to non-cyclical factors; that is, if the world economy were better right now, it would be even greater.

Actually, I would like to state things more strongly: No discussion of the Israel economy is complete without looking at the situation of the last few years. It's truly remarkable.

Thorfinn, How does "currency devaluation allow small countries to do well in a crisis"? Israel's currency floats, so it can't be simply devaluated. Yes, the Bank of Israel can intervene (and it does), but every kind if action causes an opposite reaction. "Printing" money results in inflation (there is very little), borrowing money results in debt (there is some of this). In any case, the fundamental reason the Bank is intervening to keep the shekel level (with incomplete success) is because the Israeli economy is strong, which would otherwise cause the shekel to appreciate. In other words, I think you have it backwards. I agree with mmok and others that the theory you need to disprove is Israel's history of socialism. Socialism is a real economy-killer. All other factors are tertiary. But they are nevertheless interesting. One thing that few people realize (even in Israel) is the worst aspect of Israel's island-like economy: there are a large number of important industries without real competition, simply because they don't have many players. For example, the top two dairies make the vast majority of Israel's milk products. The top dairy (Tnuva) has more than a 50% market share, I think. This is much more important than your point above about international trade facilitating specialization. As for the trust issue, I don't see it. Here four neighboring countries with very similar GNP/capita: 22 - Sweden 34 - Britain 45 - Germany 55 - France Do you see those numbers reflected in their economies? How about these: 19 - China 52 - South Korea 53 - Japan ?!?!?! I have a feeling that there are linguistic issues with these numbers. For example, there are several words in Hebrew which could be used to translate "trustworthy" and I think they would give different results.

Thorfinn, Go back one or two more years and you will see the incredible appreciation of the shekel. My point is that there was no monetary expansion. Between 1995-2005 Israel's relative position dropped? Well, there was the crisis of 2000-2003, that combined the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the traumatic end of the Oslo era. That was the proximate cause of the reforms of 2003, which increased economic freedom in Israel immensely. For example, before 2003 there was essentially no finance in Israel: Israel was the world's top per-capita destination for venture capital and it all came from outside the country! Israel's economy has been free in some very significant ways only since 2003 - not that much time. I don't think Israel is governed so poorly - now. As to why it was in the past, I could go on for a long time but I won't. There are a lot of historical reasons. It could have been worse, though. A lot of Israel's founders were communists. It was in fashion in those days - even in America. "Being part of an ethnically diverse, low-trust society encourages people to look to big government as a solution"! Well, that is exactly the opposite of what I've heard in the past on this very blog!

http://yerouchalmi.web.officelive.com/images/dollarshekelgraph1.jpg http://yerouchalmi.web.officelive.com/images/euroshekelgraph.jpg So, you can see that the shekel has been appreciating, more-or-less, since 2003.

I was suggesting that opportunity costs might explain why people delay indulgence. Redeeming a gift card, for example, takes time and effort. Perhaps you delay it until you have free time and energy? Perhaps you are saving it for a time when you can really enjoy it? Can you imagine a person in a store with the coupon in hand, seeing exactly what he wants to buy, and delaying the purchase? I can't.

Maybe we enjoy projecting control to others sometimes. 
 
If doing these activities is zero sum over time, it's not clear why we should care whether people delay.

There must have been estimates based on blood types. Just take European distribution, African distribution, and figure out what level of admixture would produce the African American distribution. This would work quite well, as long as there is no selection for blood type (which I think there was!). So, maybe that produced the 25% estimate?

My favorite way to do it is to compare what would you be willing pay for stuff that you receive as a gift per dollar spent versus what would you be willing to pay for stuff you bought for yourself per dollar spent. The surveys converge on the idea that it is about 20% less. U.S. holiday spending per year is conservatively about $65 billion. So about 20% of that, something like $13 billion a year, is what?s destroyed through gift giving in the U.S. 
 
That's really not so much, in the context of the US economy.

I don't get why group selection is necessary for selection on religion. It's not that hard to identify cheaters.

BTW None of my comments should be seen as support for Spengler's ideas in general.

*shrug* i don't really care that much about that 
 
Then I don't understand your point. What else could you mean by "contradicts the reality of matrilineal descent"? 
 
"conversions" might have happened in italy *before* the crystallization of talmudic judaism 
 
That's not a problem, but you probably don't want me to get into that!

the genetic continuity is of a sort which likely contradicts the reality of matrilineal descent, which is a major part of the issue under debate 
 
Assuming the women converted, the facts are consistent with the claims.

According to Jewish Law, you're Jewish if your mother is Jewish or you convert. Does that make Jews a race? A family? Does it matter? Once you give up trying to shoe-horn reality into Platonic concepts, it's not too hard to understand. But why you think Spengler is playing a shell-game? I would interpret his meaning as being that the physical characteristics of Jews fit many racial archetypes, but there is also a lot of genetic continuity. This is true, how is it a shell game, except for the fact that trying to shoe-horn reality into Platonic concepts is always something of a shell game? 
 
As far as the legal issue goes, it's not clear to me why it focuses on the race issue, rather than the conversion issue...

jan,  
 
I am thinking that the Indus Valley civilization was populated mostly by people of Middle Eastern descent - perhaps relatives of the Elamites. By this model, the pre-agricultural South Asians did better than the pre-agricultural Europeans, who are even less well represented in the modern European genome.

"Perhaps Europeans changed after ANI left. Or perhaps ANI changed when it arrived in India." 
 
Or perhaps they weren't Europeans at all? Perhaps they were Middle Easterners - the same Middle Easterners who brought agriculture to Europe?

I am skeptical that "more religious" = "more God". Perhaps what we are seeing is that the practically non-religious (those to whom religion plays little or no practical part in their lives) are now claiming to be nominally non-religious, while the numbers of practically religious are growing? This would explain the seeming contradiction in worldwide trends, and describes what I know to be going on in the Jewish world: The number of "orthodox" Jews are growing, while fewer "non-orthodox" Jews are religious.

What two lineages is Kosmo talking about?

"The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals... These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things" 
 
You can easily imagine evolution being faster (or slower) at other times and places.

What if the same thing that happened in Europe, with the spread of agriculture, happened in India - with the following differences: Indians were more genetically distinct from the incoming Middle Easterners than Europeans were, and Middle Eastern agriculture was even less suited to India, as a whole, than it was to Europe. In other words, the signature is Middle Eastern, not European. (An Indo-European component was added later.)