Will Israel Have What It Takes?

In “Does America Still Have What It Takes?,” Charles Murray soberly registers the decline of certain central cultural characteristics that historically have sustained America’s success as a global center of progress and innovation. His warnings on these matters apply to the democratic West as a whole, where the “Europe syndrome,” as he aptly calls it, is a widespread affliction. But what about Israel? Obviously, this “start-up nation” is not competing with the U.S. for world dominance in innovation; but is there anything to be learned from a comparison between the two countries and their respective cultures?

Let me start with Murray’s list of “enabling conditions” for innovation in science and technology, of which the first is national wealth. Relatively speaking, Israel’s public debt is now at a reasonable level, having been reduced from 275 percent of GDP in the 1980s to 70-80 percent of GDP more recently; by comparison, in the same period, U.S. national debt moved from 40 to over 100 percent of GDP. (Readers of Hebrew can learn more here.) Similarly with other enabling conditions named by Murray, including the high status accorded to innovators, the existence of cities or other “centers of human capital,” the freedom to invent. On all of these indices, Israel’s situation isn’t bad at all.

What about the larger, cultural context, the surrounding milieu of attitudes and beliefs that, in Murray’s telling, both foster and drive the spirit of innovation within individuals and societies?