A meeting with Dan Ben David is a meeting with a concerned, if still optimistic, Israeli. He is the president and founder of the Shoresh Institution and a senior faculty member of the Department of Public Policy at Tel-Aviv University. He is a man dedicating his career to fighting Israel's existential war: no, not the war against nuclear Iran, against terrorism, against BDS. Ben David is fighting a war less glamorous, but no less consequential – a war for better social and economic policy planning.
Is this really an existential war?
An hour with Ben David and his graphs and data might convince you that it is. Just take a look at the Shoresh handbook, and it is all there: Israel's growing problem with productivity, Israel's problem with labor force participation, Israel's income inequality, education gaps between populations, lack of proper investment in infrastructure. Israel's current economy, argues Ben David, has a misleading quality to it. It may appear healthy and relatively vibrant, but in fact it is going south.
Most of Israel's troubles are matters related to national priorities. Here is one example out of many: A long time ago, Israel had almost 3.5 hospital beds for every 1000 Israelis. Today it only has 1.9 beds for every 1000 Israelis. This “has brought Israel to the bottom rungs of the OECD ladder. 31 of the remaining 33 OECD countries have more hospital beds per capita than Israel”.
Is it good for Israel to be at the bottom? One could argue that life expectancy in Israel is still very high even without hospital beds– so maybe more beds are unnecessary. On the other hand: fewer beds mean more people with no proper solution to their health problems, more suffering and agony. Fewer hospital beds just like fewer university professors, or schools in which the curriculum does not include math, or too many cars congesting Israel's insufficient roads –reflect priorities. They reflect the priorities of Israel's leaders, and their ability to prioritize long term important investments over short time superficial gratifications.
Here is another example. This one is more on the radar of observers of the Israeli scene. The ultra-Orthodox community is the fastest-growing population segment in Israel. You can see the numbers in my colleague Uzi Rebhun's new paper (for JPPI): Israel Today: Society, Identity, and Political Affinities. Rebhun shows that “there is a clear trend of an increased proportion of Haredim and a decrease in the secular”. Again – good, bad? That is for you to decide. But Ben David will not let you get away from some of the troubling implications of Haredi growth.
Ben David writes: “The opening of Haredi colleges in recent years has led to a popular sentiment that Israel is finally turning the corner on the education issue among Haredim. There has been a substantial increase in the number of Haredim in higher education, something that is visible and reported on frequently in the press”.
Obviously, Haredi higher education is key to Haredi integration into the work force and contribution to Israel's economic life. But there is a problem with the “sentiment” that Haredis are becoming more educationally integrated. A serious problem: it does not withstand further scrutiny. Ben David: “the percentage of prime-working age (35-54 year-old) Haredi men and women with academic degrees has been very low and – despite the volatility due to the small sample sizes – relatively stable over the past decade. This contrasts sharply with the much higher, and rising, rates of academic attainment among non-Haredi Jews in Israel”.
But what about the really young Haredis? Don't we see the change among them? No – says Ben David. In fact, “when the age group is lowered to 20-34, the rates are even lower” for Haredi men. The growing number of educated Haredis (that is, educated in the secular fields) is a mirage. Because the percentage of educated Haredis is actually declining.
Here it is in color:
The Haredi factor – and the Arab factor – keep popping at Ben David's presentation, but he refuses to subject these two communities to the role of Israel's economic scapegoat. No doubt: more Haredis need to get more education and go to work. No doubt, when Arab (Muslim) women in Israel become more educated their contribution to Israel's economic success is also growing. Israel does have a significant problem with these two groups, and would be much better off had it found a more efficient way to convince these two groups to change their traditional habits.
But this is not a key to solving all of Israel's problems. As you can see in the next graph, even excluding Haredis and Arabs, Israel's income inequality would still be much higher than most other countries' (the upper red line: Israel including everybody, the lower red line, Israel excluding Haredis and Arabs).
Does Israel want to be a more equal society?
There are two dimensions to answering such question: one ideological (do we see value in equality in and of itself), the other one practical (does making Israel more equal contributes to its wellbeing).
Ben David would probably answer both questions affirmatively. But he would emphasis that his goal is not taking away from the wealthy to give more to the poor – in fact, his graphs show that there is not a lot to take away from the wealthy. To put the poor on a more equal footing, Israel is going to have to improve their ability to excel and participate in a modern workforce. And to do this, according to Ben David, Israel will have to rescale its national priorities. Spend the funds where they are needed to benefit the community as a whole, rather than spending them on particular needs and interests and priorities of factions within the community.
Talking to Ben David and reading his material makes one confront certain realities and grapple with certain questions about Israel.
Of course, it is possible that his analysis – rather than numbers – misses something. It is possible that trends are just about to change and he does not yet see it. It is possible that Israel's problems pale in comparison to the problems brewing in other countries. It is possible – and healthy – to question the assumptions underlying Ben David's study, and to have more confidence in Israel's inner ability to overcome the obstacles portrayed by his graphs.
In the days since our meeting last week, I spent some time looking for possible misses in the analysis. One example: the emphasis on formal education does not take into account the role of Israel's military in fostering innovation and excellence. In other words: maybe Israel does not need to care as much about the declining number of university professors since the number that counts is the one of military officers in intelligence and technological units. Maybe.
Or another possible miss – this one I raised with Ben David: what if all of the calculations made by Israel's economists suffer from their inability to properly asses the magnitude of Israel's “black economic market” (everybody agrees that it is significant. The question is how significant).
Ben David is not blind to possible misses. He is not a scare tactics propagandist, and is willing to consider possible misinterpretations. And yet, he point out, the accumulation of so many indicators showing that Israel is on the wrong track must be telling us something. It is telling us something not about the Haredi community or the Arab community. It is telling us something about a community much smaller but no less influential: the one of decision makers, preferring the short time political conveniences to the long run strategic decisions.
