The one country that doesn't treat their women like cattle,
The one country that has a full fledged functional democracy,
The one country that hasn't mixed Islam with government,
The one country with the technical capability of fighting 3 multiple front wars,
The one country that without oil is still able to manage an GDP per Capita of over $15,000
And the one country that hasn't tendered men to chicken out on life and go bomb some infidels because it's a short cut to heaven
THAT'S ISRAEL?????
How can that be!!???
You know what it is!!!?? It's those damn Jews! That's what it is!
You're right, it IS those damn Jews. Because it certainly isn't Islam that's kickin' economic ass and offering a reason to live and enjoy life (although I will make a tentative exception for Indonesia).
Not that I object to the general gist of this, especially given that I'm an Israeli and (relatively) sane, but I do have some details I want to nitpick at:
ReplyDelete1. Israel hasn't mixed Islam with government, true. But we do have Judaism pretty much mixed with government. And there's not much in Judaism which is particularly pro economics.
Heck, one of the most noticeable effects is a large group of people who avoid the military service for religious reasons, and are then not allowed to do something productive with themselves during the duration of the service since the claim is that they serve the party by praying and studying bible instead. They do take taxpayer's money, though, to support that praying. Just one example.
But you can add others, like public funding of religious classes in school (or wholly religious schools), subsidies and support for many religious entities, compulsory breaks over the Shabbat/weekend, and so on and so forth.
I'd say that on that point Israel isn't really ahead of its neighbours.
2. The 3 multiple fronts war is also highly theoretical. We're at war with Syria, but nobody is actually fighting it full-scale. We're at peace with Jordan and Egypt, and at least in the case of Egypt there's a decent chance that on a full scale war we won't be able to hold the front without resorting to nukes.
So given that those war's aren't exactly very active, you could make the same claims about Turkey, or about Iraq for a very long time until they lost one recently. Officially practically nobody in the Middle East is at peace.
3. I'm curious about those GDP per capita figures. Published in 2006, but when are they updated for? Are they adjusted for PPP or something else?
Running a quick comparison to the table on the (recently updated) CIA World Factbook site
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html
the numbers are different, but more importantly the ratios are different. Everyone who trails behind Israel on the graph you provided also trails behind it there, but countries like Iran and Turkey, for example, have more than a third the GDP per capita of Israel, compared to the much smaller percentage on your graph.
Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, as another example, are Islamic countries who are even listed as having a higher GDP per Capita than Israel...
4. Just a general irrelevant quip about how I'm not sure I'd call our democracy entirely functional, but that's beside the point.
5. And, staying on the irrelevancies, we don't treat woman like cattle, but one of the more prominent Rabbis here made a few years ago a religious verdict consisting of equating walking between two women to walking between two donkeys (something which there are apparently some religious problems with, probably purity related, but I'm not entirely sure, nor care).
Hi Yaron,
ReplyDelete1. Yes, that's why I said Islam and not religion in general. Israel and to a lesser extent the US had Judiasm and Christianity influence their governance, but with relatively great economic success. It seems when you have Islam in government, it tends to coincide with poor economics. Turkey, perhaps would be worth looking at in that it's a secular government and making some strides to get in the EU/modern world.
2. I was referencing the Yom Kippur War, The Sinai War, and the 6 days War.
3. Good eye. They're from the World in Figures Pocket Book 2006, which I surmise comes from the OECD. That being said, you're right, they are NOT adjusted for purchasing power parity. A lazy error on my part, but it was just faster for me to flip through the book than go online an look up each country individually.
5. And yes, while I don't treat women like cattle either, there are times where the donkey comment would have been absolute praise compared to what I was thinking about women at particular times. Right next to the studio where I broadcast is another radio station, FM 107. One of their shows is called "Mothers and Daughters." Gag.
1. While I'm not too enthusiastic about religions in general, Islam included, I'm not sure that's true. You also have dirt poor and badly managed Christian countries. And there are those three Islamic countries I mentioned which, while I'm sure suffer from other problems, have a higher GDP per capita than Israel.
ReplyDeleteIf you start from the assumption that having Islam in government is worse than having any other religion in it, then you can find things in the data that look like they support it. But if you just look at the data and see if you can actually infer that from it, I don't think that will work.
2. In the 6 Days war Israel indeed fought on three fronts, and did a pretty good job, I'll grant us that. It was a while back, though, and we're not doing it on a regular basis. Nor are the Islamic countries around us fighting on multiple fronts and losing all the time. They do fight and have wars, and they are mostly still around. So using it as a basis for the claim that Israel is nowdays the one country with the technical capability of fighting multiple front wars is a non-sequitur.
The Sinai War reference I totally don't get, this war was Israel together with Britain and France against Egypt.
Locally we don't even refer to it as a war, but as an Operation.
As for Yum-Kipur, yes, that was a war with two fronts, and a hard one. But Israel's victory wasn't exactly obvious from the start. It had as much, if not more, to do with luck than with technical capabilities.
Heck, one of the main advantages (you could call it an amazing success of our military counter-intelligence, except for the fact that it wasn't intentional) was that the attack was going so well both for Syria and Egypt that they were certain we're leading them into all sorts of terrible traps, and stopped their attack momentum all by themselves.
We learned our lessons and improved a lot since, both in doctrine and in technology and military equipment, but so did Egypt, and to a smaller extent Syria.
6. (Yes, yes, adding a new topic in the middle of a conversation) There are other factors beyond Islam which are different between Israel and the Islamic countries you compared it with. None of them got the amazing assistance in funds that Israel receives from the US for a long long time now. And since the reason for that assistance isn't directly related to the fact that Israel isn't Islamic, the comparison doesn't control for it.