The Other Side of the Tel Aviv Cluster
I am sure that many people will be emailing David Brooks’s op-ed piece in today’s NY Times, The Tel Aviv Cluster. In it Brooks writes
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.
This meme has been making its rounds since the book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle
During the decade since 1999, Israel passed a milestone when its future formally parted ways with its past. In the past decade, former Israeli pupils went on to receive more Nobel Prizes in the sciences per capita than in any other country in the world. Meanwhile, current pupils, those in the country’s top fifth percentile, ranked close to the bottom compared to the Western world in every single exam (see table). How ironic it is that while receiving such a reminder of Israeli society’s potential, we’re also witnessing the terrible bungling of the baton’s passing between generations.
There is one comment in Brooks’s column which will hopefully get as much attention as the rest of it.
The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.
While these days the splendor of politicians in general seems not to shine too brightly, most of those in Israel, left, right, and center, seem to be near that bottom fifth percentile.