Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. It is my great honour to present this record to you today, Professor of Neal Ophir,
who is the teacher, the professor of economic history here at Oxford and Fellows.
Also College Emeritus Professor Hofer has written extensively on post-war economic growth,
particularly in developed societies and the challenge that affluence presents to well-being.
His most recent work is on the strife between neoclassical economics and social democracy.
Each of them vying to shape the post-war decades.
The latest among his many publications are the challenge of affluence, self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950s.
Came out with Oxford University Press in 2006 and the Nobel Factor, the prize in Economics,
Social Democracy and the Market Turn with Gabriel Soderberg, Princeton University Press 2016.
And the title of his talk today is Quality of Life and Well-Being in Israel Today.
Professor Ofer, thank you for coming. Thank you.
Thank you for coming. I'm going to run away about a quarter to four.
So don't be offended. I have to do this. Something else.
But I'll be happy to respond by you and any questions remain.
So how do we measure well-being?
This is an issue of the 20th century and.
The initial solution was called the national accounts.
This is an attempt to aggregate economic well-being by adding up all the trades, all the financial trades in the economy.
And there is a headline number which you'll all be familiar with GDP or divided by the population GDP per head.
This is not intended as a measure of welfare or as a measure of progress, but that's the way it's been used as a consequences.
Since it wasn't intended for that purpose.
There are immediately doubts about its validity as a measure of this kind because it leaves out a lot of things.
For example, it leaves out housework. Leaves out leisure.
It leaves out the environment. It also leaves in things which shouldn't be in it.
We'll go into that in a minute. So this dissatisfaction eventually in the 1960s, in fact, quite earlier than that,
bread attempts to get closer to what welfare, what well-being is really about.
And over the years, three main approaches have crystallised.
The first is extending the national accounts by bringing in the things that are left out and throwing out the things that are left.
The second is in winterising the objective determinants of well-being.
So what is the source of well-being? You know, being healthy is usually associated with well-being.
So let's look at how healthy people are. Being educated might be thought as a determinant of well-being.
It isn't always. So let's see how educated people are.
So you decide what the tenants are and you invent a rise and you see, how much have we got to do?
The third approach is simply to ask people, How do you feel?
Very happy, moderately happy or unhappy.
This is called subjective well-being or colloquially happiness.
And so that's a more psychological way of approaching it.
And fairly early on in this project, a paradox emerged, which is named after the person who first published the Eastern Paradox,
which is that economic growth does not seem to increase happiness or subjective well-being or S.W.,
because I am going to call it from now on, beyond the basic level.
So actually it does increase it a lot when you're very poor,
but after that stuff increase in well-being and there's a classic curve which looks like that.
So you can see that at low levels. What it shows is.
This is this is GDP per head measure of wealth.
Well, a measure of income, actually. And this is a scale of happiness from 2 to 9.
And you can see that when your wealth is very low, then every increase in wealth increases well-being by quite a lot.
But once you reach a fairly moderate level, $15,000 per head, it levels out.
So this is the Eastern paradox. So I'm now going to go through the three methods.
So the first is extended accounts. The accounts this is essentially you start with GDP and you take out the balance.
You also add some goods. But let's leave that to one side.
So the result is not called GDP, but I ACW index of Sustainable Economic Welfare.
So you start with GDP per head in the UK, which you can see from 1950 to about 2000, seemed to be growing in a sustainable sort of way.
But then lots of the things that are included in GDP are not necessarily good.
So for example, if we have more crime and we build more prisons, then that adds up to GDP because someone pays money for that.
But that's not necessarily good, like real hospitals, crime, things of that.
We employ more policemen. That creates more employment, that creates more income, but that's not good.
So you take all these things out. So what do you take out?
Take out inequality. That's a bit controversial. Divorce.
Divorce. Not because divorce is necessarily bad, but it's economically balanced in that you lose money yourself,
you're going to share everything until death do us part.
And then you have to divide everything in the middle. Then that's not good crime, commuting, things like that.
You take them off and you can see that everything levels off.
So from around 1970 there's no increase.
And then you say, well, while we're growing,
we're also using up irreplaceable natural resources like oil or like temperature, you know, cool temperature.
We're using up coolness if you wish. So if you take that off, you have an even lower and even lower level of growth.
And it's not even level. It's beginning to decline. Now, the attraction of this kind of measure, it gives you a focal point indicator.
So are things getting better? Are things getting worse? We look at ICW and say things are definitely getting worse.
That's very useful. The other thing that comes out of it is what Iceland already discovered,
which is economic growth does not increase welfare on this account, it actually decreases welfare.
Now, this is not the end of the story because there's one factor which for some reason none of these calculations take into account,
and that's the effect of land rent. So land rent is not good for anyone except those who get it.
And I'll just illustrate this immediately.
So if you factor in land rent,
economic growth is almost entirely an illusion because house when house prices rise faster than income, that's not a benefit.
That's a cost. Even if you think it's a benefit. If you own a house, it's not a benefit if you have to buy oil.
Yes, the young people are nodding vigorously. So let's look at Israel.
This is the house price to income ratio index in Israel.
And you've seen that it's been going up very rapidly.
What that means is that people are paying much more for the same thing.
What that means is that they have less resources to pay for other things.
So economic growth is rising, but they're actually getting poorer.
That is actually quite a big thing because in modern societies the cost of housing
plus the cost of transport is a little less than half of consumer expenditure.
So this is really very, very big. So in that respect, economic growth is a bit of an illusion.
And in Israel in particular. So if we look here, what we have here is consumer price index for housing.
This is the OECD. Obviously, it is the Association of Rich Countries.
Some are not so rich like Mexico, you know, but they've been invited to the club.
So we don't question that Israel hasn't been as well. So you can see that Israel is sorry Israel.
The cost of housing is rising much faster than Israel over this period.
That is even in the area. Security is also rising pretty quickly.
How much how many years do you have to work to buy a house in Israel?
When I say a house, I mean a unit. An accommodation unit.
Well, more than pretty much any. Other country you would care to live in.
So this is the white the white curve here. Seven and a half years in Israel.
Two and a half years in the United States. So that's a cost of land around, which reduces the value of economic growth by quite a lot.
Okay, then there's a second method, which is an inventory of good things, if you will.
So this is devised by the OECD.
This at the moment is a dominant method that's being used.
It's called also the dashboard. So we're not interested in the single indicator.
We don't have a way of integrating it all together. We just look at the main domains and see how we're doing in each one of them.
And so there are 11 of those here. Some of them are up.
So some are quality of life things, health status, work life balance, education skills, social connections, civic engagement and governance.
Some of them are intangibles, as you can see, and others are more tangible environmental quality, personal security, subjective well-being.
This is the happiness thing. Income and wealth, jobs and earnings.
Housing. And these things tell you how sustainable this is.
Natural capital, economic capital,
human capital that's called education by ordinary people and social capital that's called friendship and things of that sort.
Honesty is also social capital. Okay, so that's the inventory method.
And that is the third method is subjective well-being or happiness.
This is asking people how happy you are and when you ask them.
A remarkable pattern that emerges is that it doesn't seem to change over time.
So everything else changes, but not how happy people are.
So this is a typical curve which shows subjective world big score.
This is between zero and nine from 1946.
And you can see that it's hardly change in the United States.
It's hardly changed in France. So in Japan, it's hardly changed.
Now the French are a little more erratic, as you would expect, but on the whole it seems to be very stable.
This is a period where income per head is increased by about three fold.
So people are three times wealthier, but they're just about as satisfied as you were.
You might observe that there isn't much scope for them to become any happier than they already are.
No, they're already pretty happy at the beginning of the period.
So that's quite an interesting pattern, which recurs whenever these things are measured over time.
So this is the UK starting in 1973. You can see that GDP is increasing, life satisfaction is stable.
Some people will say you don't take into account distribution for most people.
Most people haven't actually become any wealthy, especially if they have to pay for housing.
But let's put that to one side. This is the Americans.
So the curve that's rising is their real GDP per capita, their real income per head.
And the happiness you can see is that's the brown 1 million happiness.
It's stable, perhaps even declining a bit. And this is for Europe.
You can see the same story more or less. So this is really quite a strong finding.
The finding is that you can say that happiness scores are unreasonably stable and they are also unreasonably high.
You know, looking out of the window, the world doesn't look too good.
I'm not talking about North Oxford now, but most people may find this cheerfulness or wealth anyway.
They report themselves cheerful to people who ask them questions.
So that's an interesting phenomenon. Now there's a paradox here.
So this whole line of research was started by new left, new agey kinds of people who said, Well, this group is too hard nosed.
The soft things in life also matter. So this is a progressive project, and that's how I started to get interested and fairly progressive myself.
And there's a kind of happiness revolution in 2006,
when this kind of burst the surface and everyone started talking about it and began to influence policy
associated with this economist lagged and then it began to be picked up by conservative governments.
For example, New Labour. If anyone wants to contest that this is a Conservative government, please write me an email.
And the next stage is the Sarkozy committee. So Sarkozy didn't even pretend to be progressive, but he set up this committee with these great names.
Stiglitz And and to see who more or less laid down the benchmarks for quality of life research afterwards.
And the UK was not far behind, not, by the way, New Labour, but the Conservative government.
So they cut the Office of National Statistics as savagely as they cut everything else,
but they found money to set up a new unit to measure subjective well-being.
And that unit has been reporting ever since. As you can imagine, things are getting better and better all the time.
This is empirical stuff, you know? Oh, this is.
It's. Okay. The other side is the organisation of rich countries that started something called the Better Life Initiative in 2011,
who said we should measure everybody and we should measure everybody using the same
benchmarks to see whether one country is getting better than the other and so on.
So what's going on here was happiness had become a conservative cause we thought the conservatives were the nasty party.
Well, my interpretation is that subjective well-being is good news.
And so when all the news about the good news is very welcome.
And so if people feel good, it matters less if they are not doing well.
And that is why I think there is such a mobilisation of conservative resources behind quality of life measurements.
And Israel is no different than any other country.
In fact, it's better than most countries. So you can see this is life satisfaction.
These are the two measures. One is happiness and the other is life satisfaction and happiness.
How do you feel now? Life satisfaction? How do you feel about your life?
For our purposes, it doesn't matter really. But you can see that this is the OECD average.
Again, it's a 1 to 10 scale and Israel is substantially above that level and also stable.
If you say it actually wobbles a bit, it doesn't wobble a great deal.
It's actually from 7 to 6.8 and back again.
So it doesn't really wobble. It's stable and high.
And so the conservatives, of course, take credit for this.
So here's Binyamin Netanyahu opening the Knesset in 31st October 2016.
Before that, he says, Well, we've got a bunch of modern submarines.
You won't believe how good they are. This is for people who know what's going on in Israel.
But the next thing he says is a short while ago, the OECD did a satisfaction survey.
They called it a measure of happiness. Israeli citizens position themselves as fifth in the developed world.
In happiness ranking young people are even higher.
So this is Binyamin Netanyahu. And as I said, the OCD has been putting a lot of resources into this.
So they try to monitor well-being on a permanent basis.
The issue, annual reports.
And much of what I'm going to present from now on is actually taken from these reports so that you remember that inventory that I showed you.
That's what they measure. So they do international comparisons, international rankings, international comparisons.
So 11 components of well-being, four capitals.
And as soon as they started it, Israel jumped on this wagon and created a big project to generate its own data.
This project is as good or better than anywhere else in the world.
I've already hinted that what might be motivating this? So Israel is very well equipped with this stuff.
And the. Oh, you see, they actually published the monograph 130, 140 pages, a whole book, The Very First Country in the World,
which has received this honour of having the monograph entirely dedicated to its well-being using the OECD method.
And in 2017, the Israeli Academy of Sciences set up a committee.
Now I will whisper in your is in what seems like apparent ignorance of all these prior efforts is trying to emulate the same things itself.
I have been honoured to be appointed to this committee, which is why I'm talking to you here.
But I told them I won't spill any secrets. And then very interesting.
There's an institution in Jerusalem, collaborative research institution,
which is extremely respectable and produces the best stuff so far about Israel in a report in 2018.
And these are the basic findings. Now, you need to adjust yourself to what this graph shows, what this graph shows.
The circle, the black circle is the OECD average.
And the blue line is how Israel differs from it on these various indicators.
Net national income per capita. So you can see that Israel is a bit below average.
Now what is the scale? The scale is standard deviations from congregation.
You can think of it as about a third of the distance away from the average in a normal distribution.
So let's go through this. So you can see, despite what Netanyahu says, Israel is not actually at the top of everything.
So it's actually a little poorer than the average. Satisfaction with living standards is not as high as the average employment rate is about average.
Satisfaction with housing is very low for reasons which you already know.
Housing density the same thing. Employees working very long hours so far.
Obviously, all the news are bad here so far.
And then we have the good news. So the first piece of good news is life expectancy.
Israel does better than quite a lot better and self-reported good health.
How things things are fine. Now, this is the most interesting paradox here.
So Israel is very good at upper secondary educational attainment.
But when this is actually tested, it turns out that it's well below average.
This is a piece of scores. We cannot resolve this paradox today.
Sorry. So if you see the PISA scores the well. Yes.
Well below average. Yes. Despite the Israelis being super educated, maybe they're learning the wrong things.
First is, is this someone you can count on for help?
Actually, despite what we might expect, this is below average confidence in national government volunteer time, a little below average.
Again, maybe a bit of a surprise. This is air pollution.
Very bad indeed. Death by assault.
Israel is dangerous, but objectively it isn't.
Feelings of safety, life satisfaction. See, that's what Israel is best.
That's it. I'm all right, Jack. You know, the people feel very good about themselves in Israel.
Okay, so that's shows you the average now an important measure of inequality and poverty.
So where does Israel stand? This also is one area where Israel is very close to being world champions.
This is a measure of this is a standard measure of inequality.
The Gini coefficient it it goes from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 100 according to preference.
And this is the OECD average. It says the top ten countries.
What it means is the bottom ten countries or the ones with the highest scores.
Yes. And you can see that Israel is together a respectable company of the United States.
And the United Kingdom is very close to being the developed world champion of inequality.
And as for poverty, it's an even better position.
So you can see that Israel is second only to Mexico in the amount of poverty.
Poverty is defined as below 50% of median income.
So that's actually quite a low measure of poverty.
So there's an enormous amount of poverty in Israel compared with other OECD countries.
Okay. So we have a little paradox here of paradox.
The mystery is that the United States and Israel have both of them have peak inequality.
I have another study here.
If you lower the number of obesity countries to 24, then Israel and the United States come up joint first with a Gini coefficient of 44,
which is some people would regard as alarmingly high.
Now, you might wonder, what do these two countries have in common?
You know, one is the colossal giant and the other is, you know, a tiny speck on the eastern Mediterranean.
Apart from their indissoluble alliance, mysterious the mysterious alliance between these two countries, they also have this in common.
They do have some things and both have strong markets commitment and weak welfare state.
So that might have something to do with it. But I'd like to introduce another element, which is what I'm going to talk about for the rest of my talk.
You just get my watch out to make sure I don't take too much of your time.
And that is identity and gender. These are things that don't normally come into the discussion of inequality, but I'd like to introduce them.
Both these countries have what I call large identity minorities with standard of living shortfalls in the United States.
It's a blacks and Latinos, about 30% of the population that are much worse off than the rest of the population.
In Israel, it's the Arabs and the Orthodox Jews, and they're almost the same percentage of the population.
So these are identity minorities. They also have large groups of people who think of themselves as a majority, but somehow being on the periphery.
So I call them marginalised majority identities, actually, not majorities,
but they like to think themselves as representing the essence of the community, all the truths they are the true people.
So in that sense is the white working class and the evangelicals.
In Israel, it's Mizrahi, Jews of Arab speaking, country of origin in some respects politically similar types of majority identitarians.
And they also have perceived some of living shortfalls.
I say perceived because someone who looked at this said that in fact the Mizrachi Jews are not so badly off as some of them think they are.
Okay. So I think one way into this is actually to look at the United States.
So what we have here is a graph of family dynamics and gender inequality is what this is about.
Let's start with family types finally adopting over a period of 67 to about 2000.
This is dynamic.
So as shows changes over time family types, this is the male breadwinner family declines from two thirds to one third over this period,
and it's displaced by the double earner family, which rises from 30 to 50%.
Then we have quite a large group of women only households.
This is with children and the smaller a lot of men only.
Let's compare this to black families. So this is the male breadwinner family declining from a third to about 10%, a little over 10%.
The two earner family is bumping along the 30% and the growing sector is the woman only household.
And then the men is fairly small, like like the whites.
Now, let's look at the income of these groups.
So the first thing is that look at the real median family income of the most successful family type, which is the two earner family.
So you can see that the blacks earn rather less than the whites in this group.
But the important thing is that that group is a much smaller one in the black community than in the white community.
So in the white community, this high earning, they're really the only group with the rising incomes is actually expanding.
So this family type is expanding. So you can see at least 50% of the family types are actually getting better off.
If you compare this to the blacks. Well, the black rising family type is by far the poorest.
So what we can see is that the differences in income are associated with difference in being gender within the identity minority.
Yes, the blacks are the identity minority I'm talking about.
So let's look at Israel income, unemployment by identity and gender.
So this is income per head. We have three groups here. One is Orthodox Jews.
This is income per hand, the other is non Orthodox Jews and the third is Arabs.
You can see that the two identity minorities have an income that's about half income per head is about half of that of non-Orthodox Jews.
What about employment? So the distinctive gender employment patterns among men to begin with.
So remember the bronze is the Orthodox man and you can see that there labour
force participation from this start in 1990 said labour force participation the.
Clients from 60% to about 35% over this period of, shall we call it, right wing dominance in Israeli politics.
And it's beginning to climb again, but not very much. The Arabs are below average.
The the yellow line is the average of everyone.
So the Arabs are below average. This is men. But their participation has been increasing.
And then the others, yes, the non-Orthodox Jews, they have high labour power.
They have high male labour participation rates, more than 90%.
Just for comparison, the United States is under 60%, the same figure.
So this is actually rather high labour participation rates.
Now let's look at the employment of women.
And the striking thing here is that already women this is the brown are not far below the average and have now converged on the average.
In this case, it's Arab women who are excluded, as it were, from the labour force.
So you can see that labour force participation is much, much lower.
So what we can see is that these two identity minorities, what defines their identity is different gender roles in the labour market,
very different forms of gender participation in the labour market.
This is a political economy interpretation of what is going on here.
So identity minorities discriminate against women.
That's an essential feature of their identity to discriminate against women.
Gender inequality increases income inequality because in the world of today, maximising family income means that both partners are working.
Now the marginalised majorities, you know, I describe as white working class in the States and lastly in Israel, resent identity minorities.
So there's a tension between the majority of minorities and the minority minorities.
And I've even written this up. So in America they vote for Trump, in Israel, they vote for Bibi.
And the vote is a kind of gesture of opposition to yet another group, to a minority group.
That is the main substance. I think arguably that is the main substance of these votes.
There is also in the political economy of these countries, there's big business and big finance,
big business and big finance support the marginalised majority biases in return for their votes.
So in the United States, the Republican Party is allied with the white working class to support Trump.
In Israel, the tycoons of big business are aligned with the Likud and they use these votes to implement their
business finance agenda and thus the identity voting underpins rightwing anti equality politics.
So it's not only the gender discrimination but also the anti welfare state politics, which is implemented with identity votes.
That is the system. And the irony here is just as the right wing is appropriated, happiness from the left.
The left also came up with identity and the right wing is appropriated identity politics from the left.
In addition to that, in Israel, there's a special story which is the Orthodox Jews cut a deal with the marginalised majority.
So there's a political alliance between the parties and the Likud.
And the purpose of it, as far as the Orthodox are concerned, is to keep women in their place,
not only within their communities, but in every other community.
And so what I argue here is that in the extreme inequality that we see both in Israel and the United States at very similar levels,
is driven by identity and gender. One of the consequences of this is that if you marginalise women, one of the responses is high birthrates.
If women are denied autonomy, denied agency, then one of the consequences is high birth rates.
And this is another thing which Israel is a leader way ahead of everyone else.
So this is the number of children per woman in the OECD.
This is this dotted line is the level required for reproducing the population.
And you can see that Israel here is way ahead of any other country.
It's actually been rising a bit. These dots represent the previous, you know, 19, 1795, 2006 thing.
So Israel is even higher than it was in 1995 at about three children per woman, lifetime completed fertility.
And we can project this into the future. We can project the size of the different communities.
So this is what it is today or 2009.
So you can see that the variety is a sizeable slice, the abs and even larger slice.
But most of the pie is made up of non orthodox Jews.
By 2034, both of these communities are much larger and this community is noticeably smaller and by 2059,
together they achieve parity with the rest of society.
So far we've been talking about three groups.
Is that everyone that's available for counting?
Well, the OCD actually on every title, every chapter heading, it has this reservation.
It prints this reservation. The statistical data for Israel supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant Israeli authorities.
The use of such data is without prejudice to the states of the Golan Heights, Easterners and Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
So, by the way, it's impossible. That's one thing that came up in the discussions of our committee that the
historical Israel within the Green Line no longer exists as a statistical entity.
So it's impossible actually to measure what's going on there. So who counts?
Well, the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, they do count because they're Israeli citizens.
Who doesn't count?
12 Arabs and East Jerusalem Arabs in the area, Sea Palestinian Authority in Gaza, all of them under direct or indirect Israeli control.
All of these people in this entity, whatever you want to call it, are not counted for sorry.
Just what is very of is a another part of the economy.
Sorry. How do they justify it? They're not counted for quality of life measures.
According to the Holy See, the methodology. Why it's important you raise this.
We raise this in the community discussions. I'm supposed not to tell you any secret, so I'll tell you the secrets.
Don't tell anyone else. So we raised this question.
We actually said some of us said, let's do just the green line, Israel.
So the statistician there said, you can't do that because it doesn't exist for statistical purposes.
So let's do everything you said. You can't do that either because that's Palestinian Authority.
So we're stuck with with these measurements, which include Area C and apparently include the settlers, as far as I understand.
But it just worth remembering that when we're measuring quality of life, not everyone counts equal.
Yeah, no. You also might have noticed that there's a big group which sometimes identifies itself as separate,
maybe the non the religious Jews, or maybe the Mizrahi Jews who don't appear as a group here.
I think ideally we'd like to have them in some form or other, but we don't.
The point really is that. These averages, these large averages are misleading.
And what we have is distinctive. Identity groups live under different jurisdictions with different sets of entitlements and rights.
And so the aggregate averages are misleading. Quality of life is also determined by identity.
Historically, quality of life measurement is focussed on outcomes for individuals that arises from its origins and economics.
Economics is a very individualistic sort of discipline which considers the outcome totally meaningful for individuals.
It doesn't see beyond the individual.
Nevertheless, I think it's part of everyone's experience that one derives considerable value from membership in larger groups,
support of a football team, you know, being a member of a nationality.
So that's not consistent with the tradition of quality of life measurement.
Then when our committee got together, I made that point in the committee and everyone scratch their head and said,
You're right, why don't you do something about it? So happy.
So that's my job in this committee. In other words, to devise measures for the value that people derive from their identity.
So I'm going to present to you for the first time ever what my tentative findings are,
what my tentative approach is, and you can give me a verdict, but it makes sense.
Yes, I said that people derive satisfaction from identity and group membership.
We'd like to incorporate that into the OCD battery, as it were, to take account of that.
Before that. How important is identity, how important history, culture, all of these things?
Well, it turns out it's enormously important. So this is derived from some previous work I've done.
And for those of you who like this kind of thing, this is a regression of happiness.
It's regressed on first on income.
Wealth is controlled for income, so income actually doesn't count for very much.
I just mentioned it up there. How much it counts for one percentage point.
Yeah. What this measures is the percentage. Very happy.
I said when we when we survey subjective well-being, we ask people how happy I am.
Very happy. Moderately happy. Not very happy.
So this is a percent very happy and we normalise it to zero at 26%.
And then we ask people we control for income for all of these countries.
So that's left out of it, but it doesn't count for very much.
And then we ask how much is how important is relatively can being the lower third of being in the upper third?
How much does that count? Also, not terribly much. What really matters enormously is where you are, which country you're in.
And there are some surprises here. The big surprise is that Latin America is unreasonably Happy Square.
You know, they're really off the script. They're really off the scale.
So. Look at Mexico and Venezuela. They're not kind of the poster boy for happiness.
But if you ask them, they say that terribly happy.
Then the next you know, the next in line is a sort of places you could expect really, like the Netherlands.
The U.K. isn't here for some reason. Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, Ireland, South Africa is another kind of outlier.
You can go through this being in the former Soviet Union, there's not a recipe for happiness.
Maybe they missed the Soviet Union. Oh, tell you, the point of presenting this is that identity is extremely important for subjective well-being then.
It's worth having come. Initially we talked about identity and culture, and as I started thinking about this,
I arrived at the point which is not being left uncontested, that culture and identity are not the same thing.
So what is culture? In my book, culture is science, art, literature, music, parks, landscape,
all the things bright and beautiful that we have been taught to value from the Enlightenment onwards.
That is the legacy of the Enlightenment. How do we know they are good?
Because wise people told us and we learned that at school and they typically funded by government and not for profit.
There is even a concept in economics. They're called merit good, so they don't have to be justified in terms of their economic payoffs.
They're just goods in themselves. That's culture.
That's contestable. There's another thing which oh yes, I said that.
And so I said, these are brutal in itself.
And in the context of a national identity, I'd say these constitute our links with the rest of humanity.
We can agree. I think all of you hear that classical music is wonderful.
Do we agree on that? I've come to the wrong place then.
But at any rate, this you know, this is interesting.
When I when I began to think about this, I began to think of, can I identify a capital city without a symphony orchestra?
Well, Tehran has a symphony orchestra. Cairo has a symphony orchestra.
Istanbul has a symphony orchestra. Tokyo has a symphony orchestra.
Also has a symphony orchestra. So, you know, this is something that everyone thinks is good.
And that's something we can talk about with people in other countries agree upon with people in other countries.
Identity is something different. I call it the economic term as a club.
Good. This is a kind of good which is available only if you're a member of the club.
Only if you're an insider. So religious groups, ethnic groups, nationality I throw in sports, give me a football supporter.
You know, it works in a similar type of way. It matters to people's wellbeing very substantially.
But how much how do we evaluate or measure how much how important this is to people?
I'm here, I'd like to present the general principle. The principle is how do we think about norms in general?
Like telling the truth, something that sort of. Yes, a norm is only interesting if it requires some sort of sacrifice.
If a norm is aligned with your interest and it's redundant, you don't need the norm to explain your behaviour because your interest is sufficient.
So norm is only interesting if it requires a sacrifice.
So the method then is all the inside.
If such it is, is that the value of the norm is greater to you than the sacrifice incurred.
Let's imagine that I find the world on the pavement with £1,000.
And so naturally I go to the police station and hope that they will hand it over to the person who lost it.
And presumably the norm of honesty in this case is worth at least £1,000.
To me, that's basically the method. So let's look at how I did use the male children don't study science, mathematics and foreign languages.
That's a disadvantage in the labour force. So they have a lower standard of living.
Presumably the identity is worth more to them then that sacrifice.
That's the method I propose to use.
In other words, the shortfall is a measure of the advantage and they have the highest subjective well-being of any identity group in Israel,
the heritage Jews. So identity groups typically suffer a disadvantage or shortfall.
That's why I don't think of, for example, the Classical Music Lovers Club assembled here as an identity group because we're all privileged,
you know, you haven't sacrificed anything for this. So it's not really interesting.
But identity groups that are salient normally suffer some disadvantage or shortfall.
Let's look at identity. Well, Israeli Israel is rife with identity politics.
We have these categories, the survey categories of hierarchy, Arab and the rest.
Now, there's also the fourth group I said, which is the Mizrahi or maybe non following the religious how they disadvantaged systemically
you know all these non religious or Mizrahi people all the disadvantaged systemically.
I would've thought so, but not everyone is sure about this.
At any rate, the Shas party is based on the premise that they are.
And you know, that's true. That's been sufficient to mobilise a certain amount of votes.
The Likud is explicitly anti-Arab. The latest expression of this is the nationality law, which gave Jews precedence over Arabs in Israel.
So that's again the kind of identity appeal or identity vote.
The Minister of Culture is, you know, almost designed for the purpose of this lecture,
because what she does is to normalise these identities against the universalist culture.
So she validates my classification by saying that I haven't read Chekov and I don't plan to.
So I would characterise her as a minister, minister of identity, not as a minister of culture, although her job is to be minister of culture.
Now does this in question? Is identity a matter of personal choice?
Do you have a choice in being a Jew or maybe an Arab?
Or maybe I mean, it's roughly a one of these other things. And the answer to this is that you cannot shed identity very easily because it's
the glue of social affinity and it's underpinned by very powerful sanctions.
So being excluded from your identity group is very, very costly.
In extreme cases, you might even be murdered for it.
And so the if there are exit and entry options are rather costly.
So I think we don't need to dwell too much on the matter of choice.
So the argument here is that the subjective benefits of identity are greater than the objective sum of disadvantage.
That is my measurement. That is my proposed measurement method to see to what extent membership in an identity group involves a sacrifice.
And to say arbitrarily, perhaps, is that the identity is worth more than these sacrifices.
How do we measure this advantage on all these social indicators?
We just look at how these groups, how the identity groups fare on the social indicators,
how they score on all the social indicators that allows us to see whether we should follow them or not.
And here we have another graph of the same kind, which looks at the two main minority identity groups in Israel,
the Havarti and the Arabs, and the comparison group.
Here, the dark blue is Non-horror Jews.
So let's look at the Arabs. This is a grey figure. You can see that the Arabs are suffer shortfalls in every domain except one.
The one they don't suffer a shortfall on is health satisfaction.
So they are satisfied with their health as everyone else.
But in every other respect they are below average.
So they really have a hard time compared with the general Jewish non-celebrity population.
With regard to the idea, the picture is a little more mixed.
So what shortfalls do they suffer? They lower labour participation rate.
If that is a disadvantage. Freedom from disability, they actually suffer more from disability.
Uh. Sorry, I'm looking at the wrong one. No freedom from disability actually doing better.
Health satisfaction. They're doing better. Tertiary educational study.
They don't go to university and yeshivas don't count somebody to count on.
That's interesting.
You know, so although they have this image that they look after each other, it looks out that they're no more than average on that volunteering.
They seem to be keen on volunteering, frequent physicals also.
So actually the heritages do better than the average on most of these measures.
This is not, by the way, exhaustive the things I haven't included housing, employment, housing, care of income, things of that sort.
But I will in a moment. So let's look at that.
This is income distribution by population group. So we have five populations.
This is the lowest and this is the highest is divided into five.
These are Quintiles five. And you can see that the lowest quintile is populated almost entirely by Arabs here and by the Jews.
So this is where poverty is. Concentrated in Israel and the fewer and fewer of them as you go up towards the top.
The non-Orthodox Jewish population is divided about equally is kind of normal curve.
No, it's actually increasing towards the top. So they're doing okay and you find them in all income groups.
However, this is by far the largest group.
So if you look at where poverty is concentrated in Israel, you can see that about half the half the poor in Israel arms,
there's quite a large chunk of haredim, but there's still quite a large chunk of non-haredi Jews who are poor because this is the largest community.
So there's no question that these how many Jews are deprived in the sense of having lower incomes.
Therefore, basically, and very few of them are even in the fifth quintile, in the top quintile, which is the top 20%.
That's a very big group, you know, schoolteachers and a group of public schoolteachers.
Okay. So, okay, now this is for connoisseurs.
So this is a regression. What is this?
Regression shows the average deviation of life satisfaction of the individual relative to a non-violent Jewish woman.
That's the point of reference. And what these figures measure is whether the particular category here,
they have a whole set of categories of very strong, this non-family Jewish woman.
And by how much? So we have three models.
This is just the main thing. So what you can see here is that when you take just these variables, male age eight square is a nonlinear measure of age.
So it goes like that and sort of like that. Income, secondary education, tertiary education.
So everything is good except getting older. I'm not sure I agree with that.
And in fact, the statistic doesn't agree with that because if you take the age square, which is the nonlinear, it turns out that the older the better.
That's my experience. Then you have a full model here.
We don't need to dwell on this because that's not interesting.
This is really the interesting one, which has all the variables.
Some things make you feel bad, like being a male or being older, although not being of the squared.
Education makes you feel better. Secondary education makes you feel better.
Tertiary education makes you feel worse. Okay.
Come to the wrong place for unemployed.
That's definitely a big minus.
And social connections make you feel, you know, it's all more or less as you would expect security if you feel insecure.
Presumably that makes you feel not. If you feel secure, that makes you feel worse.
It depends on how it scale environmental quality.
If it's high, you feel high health status.
Again, it depends on how it scale. Working long hours makes you feel bad.
No, this is the clincher. How is it measured by the work?
You know, I'm not sure how they regard done. This is important because the question is, can these coefficients being compared with each other?
And the answer is, I don't know. Depends on which method they've used, which they haven't bothered to disclose.
So maybe they can and maybe they can't. But it doesn't matter, because in the variables that do matter, they are compatible.
And that is. Oh yes. And the coefficient. So by how much negative or positive.
And what it shows is that after controlling for all the objective shortfalls and advantages, both of them could score positive and identity.
So you'd expect, you know, the Arabs suffering all these discrimination would feel bad about being Arab.
No, they feel good about being Arabs. So this is a kind of confirmation.
Had they not done it for me, the OCD, without knowing what they were doing, they didn't know they were confirming my hypothesis.
But had they not done it for me, I would have done it myself and hopefully have found the same thing.
So what you can see is that identity actually compensates for shortfall, attenuate in terms of life satisfaction.
That's awful. But the life satisfaction. So confirmation of identity.
So this is a confirmation of my model. And we've reached that conclusion a bit late.
So Israel, a divided, unequal society with strong identity subgroups and focal points, falls within obviously parameters except for the birth rate,
extreme inequality and poverty, high level of subjective well-being, inequalities and divisions run more along identity than class lines.
Most distinctive identity groups reject the value of equality.
I think that's an important point. There's a norm against equality in the distinctive identity groups within the group for women and
externally from self for some of the other identities inside the women are largely complicit with.
So, you know, I used to say, well, it's not a surprise that they have a high subjective well-being.
If I didn't have to go to work, I'd also have a subjective, subjective well-being.
And indeed, I don't have to go to work.
And I do have a high subjective well-being, but it turns out that the women have even the higher subjective well-being than the men.
So go figure. In the short run, identity equalises life satisfaction, even for the victims of discrimination.
And so identity is a kind of equaliser in this story.
In the long run, it threatens to undermine the existence of civil society in Israel and perhaps its very existence as a secular
state because of the high birth rate among illiberal and anti pluralist identities like the religious.
Thank you so much. We have spent more. Questions and answers.