About teaching at the IDC

This year I had the pleasure and privilege to teach the course I developed for PresenTense, meant for social entrepreneurs, to honors students at one of Israel’s leading undergraduate colleges: the IDC. After months of on-and-off attempts to write something about the experience of porting a course and curriculum developed for informal educational experiences for entrepreneurs into a regimented, graded, formal academic environment for honors level students, I finally blogged about it on the PresenTense blog, here:

In my opinion, there are few things more enjoyable and more rewarding than teaching a person new skills that can help them make an impact on the world. Over the past five years, since we established the PresenTense Institute for Creative Zionism (and with it our program for social entrepreneurs in communities around the world), I’ve had the privilege to teach hundreds of entrepreneurs and organizational professionals tools and tricks for how to start social ventures.

But it wasn’t until this year that our unique curriculum was honored by being included among college courses – available only to honors students, no less. In the fall semester of 2012, the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (known as the IDC, and one of Israel’s leading undergraduate institutions) offered A Practical Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship, which I taught.

You can read more on the PresenTense site – but most importantly, check out the video my students made after the course. Pretty cool.

Many, many thanks to Agathe Adar Sarfati, who made it, and has an exciting future ahead of her as an innovative, driving force.

I love the future, and so should you

Today I came across i09’s love letter to the future, What It Means to Love the Future, and it finally gave me the motivation to finish my article for the Times of Israel on why an Israeli politics lacking in good old fashion Zionist visioning is broken at its core. The article argues, in short:

To be more explicit: what sort of State would we or our representatives in government like to see, say, twenty years in the future? What is our goal, our ideal version of the Jewish State and its ideal relationship with the region, with the Jewish People, and with the world as a whole? Not having even a basic answer to these questions is like setting out of the house with no purpose in mind, no money in your wallet and no sense of what the weather is like outside. Sure, it can be fun for a while to wander – but it is deeply irresponsible when you have pressing issues at stake.

The current debate in Israel revolves around either the means (who will sit in the coalition), or the past (who did what to who) instead of what future we would like to have. For example, the debate about whether and how the Ultra-Orthodox and the Palestinian/Arab-Israelis will serve the country is certainly important because it can give us important information about the capacity of our vehicle of State to address the challenges it is facing, but rarely if ever in the discussion does a public leader or intellectual bring up how this vehicle upgrade might be required for us to arrive safely in a better future and why. For all of the talk of ‘Yesh Atid’ (that there is a future) that future is no more than a parve version of utopia: an Israel good for the middle class, with equal opportunity for all.

Read it all, here. And, of course, if you’re interested in a deeper look into our future only 11 years ahead of us, here’s my book.

Rise of the Taxman

[Note: I wrote this a few months ago…and for one reason or another, didn’t publish. Here it is, because I’d rather get feedback than keep a draft in a drawer.]

Bruce Wayne enters the room at the turning point of the summer’s box office hit, the Rise of the Dark Knight, and breaks up the dancing couple that is Selina Kyle, also known as the Catwoman, and her latest, wealthy, elderly, mark. It is Bruce’s first appearance in public in years, and as he leads Selina dancing through the crowd she introduces him, and the movie viewer, to the plot that is to come: “A storm is coming,” she whispers in her ear. The world order will be upended, she implies, as the 99% will rise up against their 1% overlords.

Much has already been written analyzing whether the Rise of the Dark Knight, and its political philosophy is at its core a critique of the Occupy Movement and a defense of the current financial system. Others have written that the film’s central treatise is defense of Liberal Democracy. But articles that delve into the film’s philosophy miss the point. Whether this film is art imitating reality, or whether reality imitated the art in the Batman comic books is a nice but ultimately useless discussion. The film is much more valuable not as a critique of the current, but rather as what is known as a gedankenexperiment (an experiment conducted in one’s brain, which, for the analytical minds among us, happened to be Albert Einstein’s favorite approach) focused on what would happen if our reigning financial system would disintegrate. From it we may be able to pull insights about how we think about the rich, their role in society, and their relationship with the mechanisms of State.

Understanding the wealthy and their responsibility to the State is ever more pressing at this very moment, as publics around the world, and particularly in America, contend with the question of whether an individual’s private financial dealings should affect how they feel about that individual as he (it is mostly he’s) runs for office. The most prominent of these, of course, is Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s candidate for the President of the United States, who has used tax shelters in the past to avoid paying taxes to the US Government. This action has been lauded by the Tea Party as his right as a capitalist individual who naturally should optimize his profits, and decried by the Occupy movement (and others) for showing his lack of solidarity with the majority of the American people who cannot afford the luxury of loopholes. This argument carries over to other democracies, such as Israel, where protesters exclaim that the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his sidekick Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, cannot understand the plight of the middle class due to their upper-class lifestyle and high-rise apartment flats.

But rather than polarize the argument with politics, let’s focus on the movie as a test case for thinking about taxation and its requirements. The scene set by this Batman movie (an apologies, spoilers will follow) is one in which Gotham, the prototypical metropolis, is teeming with financial intrigue and competition. While nothing is said in the film about the larger market and its discontents, the story implies that the rich are doing fine, fighting for a larger piece of the pie, and the rest are living their lives with no more than the usual daily struggles. Enter Bruce Wayne, who in his spare time is the Batman, a billionaire with the heart of the 99%, who critiques lavish fundraisers and invests his profits in bettering the lives of orphans like him.

Bruce returns to run his major corporation when he learns that the directors serving in his place have allowed profits to fall, thereby hurting the charitable contributions Wayne Enterprises has been giving to a local orphanage. A set of plot points later, Bruce has been removed from the board, Batman has been exiled, and Gotham has been overrun by an anarchist gang speaking in the language of the Occupy Movement, seeking to return the streets to the “People of Gotham.” To do so, they kill the mayor and neutralize Gotham’s Finest (the police department) by trapping them underground, setting up an alternative government of the people, represented by People’s Courts. Mayhem ensues, as the People of Gotham attack the rich with animal ferocity, take over their homes, strip them of their property, and send elderly, fur-wearing women before a court that sentences them to death for the crime of hoarding their resources and lording them over the People.

Unpacking this, a theory of the economy and society emerges that most of us will clearly recognize: Life without the rule of law is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and the State’s control is a necessary evil, enabling people to live proper lives without fear of senseless violence. Kyle recognizes the truth of this Hobbesian politics when, in the midst of this chaos, she turns away from her girlfriend and forsakes her previously revolutionary convictions, and ends up helping the billionaire Batman put the world back together where the State protects private property and order reigns supreme.

On the surface level, one could claim this is the underlying thesis of the movie, and of Western Capitalism in general: that charity should be contributed from the profits of free enterprise, that billionaires generally have good intentions, that taxes are a burden, and that the State is a necessary evil that even cat-burglars will recognize and fight for when they realize the alternative is far worse. But if we dig a bit deeper, the thought experiment concerning what happens when the State is weak and order breaks down reveals a much more fascinating insight about who benefits most from the State.

If one is to assume that Hobbes is right, and that the State is a necessary evil protecting order and allowing individuals to live productive lives generally fear-free, then what we learn from Batman’s gedankenexperiment is that no one needs the State more than the wealthy. What the film does wonderfully is help us explore how order would break down. First, there would be confusion, as individuals would drift towards their own property. Then, as some test the limits of the new order, a few petty crimes would happen. Once a few individuals find that the response of the new order to break ins or trespassing is slow or weak, looting would grow – until the point that it was no longer looting, but rather a full-scale bout of property redistribution. The Rise of the Dark Knight shows this to us most clearly in a scene where the doormen and porters in a building of wealthy, elderly individuals, escort the wealthy out, take away their possessions, and proceed to throw roaring parties in the newly ‘liberated’ venues.

What we can viscerally understand from this is that the highest opportunity cost loss associated with the breakdown of the State is born by those who have property that is not easily defended. We know this intuitively – that police show up at richer neighborhoods more readily than poor ones, that governments tend to bail out large debt holders quicker than they do little ones – but for one reason or another we haven’t yet integrated that insight into our cultural conversation about taxes. We speak about taxes as a ‘burden,’ as a challenge to overcome, as a ‘game to beat’ through deductions and loopholes, out of the notion that they are a necessary evil, without asking who values stability most. We speak about ‘progressive taxation’ as a way to ease the burden on the ‘have nots,’ instead of a way to recognize that it is the ‘haves’ that have the most to lose if the system breaks down: if the police person does not deter the doorman from looting the elderly wealthy person’s home, if the estate lawyer doesn’t pillage the estate that the deceased can no longer defend.

To use a personal example, my family, which works in the civil sector, has much less to lose than a wealthier family when Lehman Brothers falls due to lack of effective regulation, when NASDAQ failures plummet a newly minted stock, and much less at stake if commodity markets skyrocket due to a failure of foreign policy. We have less to lose because we do not have our money in the markets, because while we save we generally live according to our paycheck, and therefore we are much less exposed to the pressures that affect the wealth of those whose assets are distributed and managed. If a Dark Knight-like revolution were to break out, my family would not be targeted, whereas a richer family would have more to lose. In that context, the fact that the family with more is asked to pay a greater percentage of their net worth to maintain stability is not ‘progressive,’ it is practical and even a conservative way to hedge one’s bets and protect one’s assets. Conversely, when an individual seeks to reduce her exposure to taxation, through loopholes or tax-havens, that individual is working against her long-term self-interest by weakening the social fabric and increasing the probability that chaos will wipe out their assets in the future.

If we are to accept this new frame of thinking about taxation as insurance, as opposed to taxation as a burden, we are required to change our policies in accordance. For example, the individual who aspires to leave assets to her heirs is banking on the system remaining stable across centuries: a country whose education system (for example) does not produce skilled laborers falls in productivity, thereby falling in GDP, thereby losing its advantages in trade, thereby depreciating the assets of the individual who wanted to pass on her property to the next generation.  If she would like her progeny to benefit as much, if not more, than the current value of the assets, the least she can do is pay insurance to the state so that its mechanisms can remain strong, and those assets actually remain worthwhile in value. In this case, this means that instead of thinking of estate tax as a ‘Death Tax,’ one should think of it as ‘Long Term Property Value Insurance.’ And so on.

The share of one’s income that one pays to strengthen the mechanisms of the State should thereby be tied to the relative amount of assets one would like to safeguard. “Progressive” taxation becomes “Value-based” taxation. One might try to make the argument that individuals who benefit directly from the system through what have been called ‘entitlements’ would thereby be getting more value out of the system, but to do so would be inaccurate in pure fiscal terms: education is instrumental to ensure a skilled working class and protect productivity levels, defense acts to protect a country’s relative position so that it can trade openly and fairly, and a good welfare system keeps people off the streets so that they do not resort to crime in order to feed their families. Crimes that, if not defended against, will reduce property values, hurt the markets, and hurt the wealthy physically and directly. The wealthy extract far more value from a stable system than the working class which may or may not receive ‘entitlements.’ And when those entitlement programs do not function, the wealthy have every right to participate in the democratic process to try and amend them, but there is no justice in extracting value from a system while personally withdrawing one’s support and placing it in far-off islands.

The Rise of the Dark Knight summarizes this scenario in the best possible way: once the Police, employees of the State, are freed, they go head to head with the armies of the 99%. They, and not the populace, because our State is built on the assumption that it and it alone appoints its defenders. The tragedy of the Dark Knight is that Batman himself is never accepted by the official mechanisms of State – and in the same, way, a State can never accept an armed group that protects a minority’s interests alone. No, that’s what taxes are for: to enable the State to create one law, one order, one justice, so that individuals can focus on being productive and living good lives. In a world in which more and more of our economies are built upon computer-based trading and estimations of the value of digital assets, we will require ever more stability, and those who are benefiting disproportionately from this new economy would be wise to invest heavily in insuring their wealth into the times to come.

The foundation for my new walking desk.

#end – excuse the spartan msg; sent while mobile

Searching for a new blog

My old blog went broke … and I need a new one! But best would be a blog that could import my older feeds. We’ll see. 

Ayela at her first political event: Kadima’s candidates speak about pluralism (or lack thereof) in Israel

Training Masa in Room 11

A State of Her Own

(Here is the article Erin and I published on Tablet, A State of Her Own. The article was published after Bari Weiss, one of Tablet’s top editors and a dear friend, saw a post on Erin’s wall about how we were worried about raising a daughter in Israel. This is what resulted from our collaboration) 

***

If all goes according to plan, this March we’re going to bring a daughter into the world. Specifically, we’re going to bring her home to our apartment on Chen Boulevard, in the center of Tel Aviv, the city we’ve made our home, though we were born in the United States and Canada.

 

Had you asked us six years ago where we dreamed of raising a family, we’d have answered “Israel” without hesitation. But recently we’ve begun to doubt whether we should raise her in the Jewish state.

It’s not the escalating situation with Iran that gives us pause, or the fact that our daughter will one day serve in the army: We decided to live in Israel with full knowledge of the security threats it faces. The reason we are concerned about raising a daughter here is that the government is standing by as war is waged against girls and women.

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Orthodox have had the power to decide who is a Jew and how a Jew can live and die by controlling the mechanisms of marriage, divorce, and burial. What this means practically is that the government body that oversees all major life-cycle events—as well as regulating food production—is a religious institution, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

Orthodox religious law is the law of the land: Only a man can marry a woman, only a man can grant a divorce. And because of Orthodoxy’s systemic exclusion of women from positions of power—its refusal to allow women to be rabbis, or to recognize female Reform and Conservative rabbis—the interests of women have been disregarded.

The Orthodoxy of the rabbinate has caused friction in Israel before, but the well-publicized events of recent weeks have brought tensions to a boil. Though some had heard of the gender-segregated public buses now common in cities like Beit Shemesh, the other incidents of discrimination against women and girls came as shock: a 28-year-old woman asked to ride in the back of a public bus, an 8-year-old child called a “whore” and spat on by grown men, and a gynecological convention that barred women speakers. These incidents, carried out by ultra-Orthodox Israelis and tolerated by the ultra-Orthodox leadership, provided the majority of Israelis with clear evidence that the rabbinate’s power has helped create a rotten attitude toward women in major segments of Israeli society.

If this sort of discriminatory behavior were isolated in a few neighborhoods of the country, it would be a shame, but we would hesitate to tell others how to live their lives. Increasingly, though, it’s not isolated, and the discrimination and marginalization of women are tacitly permitted by the state. If we allow this trend to continue, Israel will cease to exist as a strong and vibrant democracy.

***

Due to Israel’s coalition-based government system, where coalition partners are given control over ministries in return for voting as a bloc, governments from David Ben-Gurion’s to Benjamin Netanyahu’s have preferred to add an ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist party to their coalition rather than create a coalition without parties such as United Torah Judaism. Such a non-ultra-Orthodox coalition could, in one vote, break the rabbinate’s power. But the major parties are stuck in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: Each party fears that if it votes against Orthodox control, while the other does not, the Orthodox would ally with the opposition to crush it. So, the status quo persists.

We could not be married in Israel because of Erin’s official lack of Jewishness, despite the fact that we are observant Jews who keep Shabbat and a kosher home. (Our marriage certificate is from the state of Illinois.) Likewise, our daughter could in the future be legally barred from marrying the person she loves in Israel. If the laws continue as they are, the two of us will not be able to be buried in the same state-run cemetery, and our daughter would be excluded from burial in a Jewish cemetery when her life is spent. She’ll be a citizen, just as we are, and she’ll serve in the army, just as Ariel did. But if the status quo persists, she will go from cradle to grave knowing that in the eyes of the government of the state of Israel she is not a Jew.In this context, our daughter will not be considered Jewish by the state. That’s because Erin’s mother had Conservative Jewish conversion in Canada before Erin was born, and because we decided it was insulting to ask Erin, who lived her whole life as a Jew, to “convert” just because a state-employed rabbi decided she is not Jewish enough.

For us, nothing is more painful. Our grandparents devoted their lives to supporting the state and its establishment, and we’ve devoted ours to building Israeli organizations that haveconnected thousands to Israel. But all of that is irrelevant in the eyes of the bearded men who have power over critical aspects of the lives of this country’s 6 million Jews.

This is not what the pioneers who founded this state worked toward, and it isn’t what generations of Diaspora Jews fought for.

***

It is time that the world Jewish community knew about this systemic bias in Israel—and time for Diaspora Jewry to act. It is amazing to think that while American Jews raise money for the state, lobby their political representatives to support Israel, and send their children on Birthright, the rabbinate denies the Jewishness of many of these Diaspora Jews.

This schism between who is a Jew in the Diaspora and who is considered a Jew by the state of Israel will only grow, considering that more than a quarter of Jewish students entering the first grade in Israel this year are ultra-Orthodox, as Dan Ben-David, director of the Taub Center in Jerusalem, has noted. This means that if we want Israel to be a Jewish state for all the Jewish people, as well as a democratic state that respects the individual rights of its citizens, we have a small window to break the Orthodox monopoly on the Israel’s core institutions.

Next year’s Israeli election is the perfect opportunity for the American Jewish community—and the rest of Diaspora Jewry—to act. Diaspora leaders need to demand from the leadership of the Israeli political parties that they make liberalization of the rabbinate a priority. It’s no secret that Israel’s political leaders and Israeli government programs depend on financial and political support from Diaspora Jews.

The Jewish Federations of North America, the Jewish Agency, the United Jewish Appeal, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish National Fund, and so on, should give the Israeli government a 90-day window to enact legislation to protect the rights of women and the non-Orthodox. Jerry Silverman, Sheldon Adelson, Howard Kohr, Ron Lauder, and other leaders of powerful Diaspora Jewish groups: Enough with the back-room diplomacy. It is time for Jewish leaders, especially in the United States, to make it clear that no money or lobbying support will flow to the government of Israel, or government-sponsored programs, if the state’s official institutions discriminate against non-Orthodox Jews. No pluralism and no recognition of women’s rights equals no cash and no lobbying support.

Our grandparents, parents, and peers did not work so hard or sacrifice so much to be judged unfit by official representatives of the government of Israel because of the crime of being Modern Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. Our women do not deserve to sit in the back of buses, or to be spat on by those who cover themselves in black from head to toe. We need to use the means at our disposal to pressure the state to protect the future of the Jewish people. Our daughters demand it.

CORRECTION, January 9: This article originally stated that close to 50 percent of Jewish students entering first grade in Israel this year are ultra-Orthodox. In fact, the number is 27 percent. The error has been corrected.

Erin Kopelow is the admissions director for Tel Aviv University’s Soafer International MBA program. Ariel Beery is the co-director for the PresenTense Group.

 

The Next Big Jump: From Capitalism to What?

Tents on Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard. The Occupation of Wall Street. Hunger strikes in India. Riots in Greece. These are just some of the expressions of angst and betrayal of youth around the world in protests that human history will forever compare to similar 'hot summers' as the riots of 1968. 

But there is something deeper at play here than in 1968. Whether it be the expressions of hope for a better future in Tahrir Square or the expressions of angst of a bleak future that led to the riots in London, to compare 2011 to protests past would be to ignore the deeper elements at play in this current round of protest. This being, primarily, the widespread belief of protesters and Venture Capitalists alike that mainstream Capitalism as failed and that a new model, an unknown model, must arise. These the far-reaching implications can be understood if the grounds for the unrest are reviewed in the context of modern economic history. 

Economic history might not be the sexiest of fields, but it is critical for us to understand the pressures that led to the transition from Mercantilism (the governing mode of trade from the 16th through the early 19th century) to Capitalism (which has survived in the West as the dominant paradigm from the 19th century until the present day, despite being challenged partway by the rise and fall of the Communist effort). While my understanding of economic history has gathered around a decade of rust, I'd say the best vantage point to understand that transition was at the point that economists understood the concept of comparative advantage. 

In 1817, a man by the name of David Ricardo wrote a book called "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation," that chipped away the last supports holding Mercantilism in place, and prepared the grounds for Capitalism to emerge triumphant. It is sometimes hard to remember that until then, kingdoms controlled the economy of the world, and set the terms by which individuals could work and earn their bread. Those kingdoms believed that what was best for the realm was to protect their local industry, and exploit the resources of other sources outside the kingdom to add to its reserves.

Ricardo noted in this important essay that it does not make sense for kingdoms to do everything. Instead, those kingdoms which were good at producing one thing, such as cloth, should focus on cloth production – and leave the wine production to countries that could do that in the most efficient manner. 

Nowadays, the idea that a collective should focus on doing one thing well and work with others to trade for what the collective needs seems self-evident. But at the time, the thought that a collective need not be independent was groundbreaking. Thanks to this insight, and the insights of others such as Adam Smith, the elites in societies around the world started investing in ventures that would grow their competitive advantage to increase wealth and prosperity. 

Capitalism was born out of this understanding: that it was not the control of trade, but rather access to capital (resources, including money and material), that mattered. Competition was seen as a means to growing the pie for everyone, as investment in firms that had comparative advantages would increase efficiency and effectiveness, generating new resources that could then be reinvested as capital in the creation of new ventures. 

Over time, Capitalism was changed and challenged by a number of ideologies, from the free-marketeers who believed that government should have its hands off of the economy (something the intellectual father of capitalism, Adam Smith, might disagree with), to Communists who believed that the free-market element of capitalism was inefficient and biased and so full state control of capital was best. But the underlying tenant, that resources when put in the hands of firms with a comparative advantage would drive creation remained, and the importance of capital as in physical, measurable material was kept at the core of economic thinking. Where Mercantilism put the interests of the collective's resources and capabilities above all, Capitalism put the importance of resource measurement, collection and allocation above all. 

It is important to understand this transition because it clarifies a fact that is sometimes forgotten in debates about economic policies and pathways: Capitalism is only one in a succession of ideas for how collectives can improve their lot through leveraging their resources to produce new solutions to human problems. And one should not conclude from the current protests that it is time to roll the progress back; instead, one should see the new economy peeking out from behind the signs and the slogans. 

Why now? Because of the speed of trade. The reason Mercantilism was supplanted by Capitalism is that communication technologies and shipping technologies enabled trade to occur at a greater frequency and level of specificity than ever before. Once, a kingdom or collective entity such as a firm would send out a ship to the West, and it would be months if not years until it understood its return on investment. Farmers would labor day in and day out to produce an indeterminate amount of grain, and it was almost impossible to calculate how much more or less grain was needed locally versus in trading nations before the grain would go bad.  Around the 18th century technology emerged to enable individuals to rethink what they were producing and with what resources, and for whom, and to privilege the production of certain goods over others based on their relative return on investment (a rate of return determined by comparative advantage). All of a sudden, cross-border trade was not only possible, it was favorable. Capital could be leveraged across the frontier, and Capitalists viewed their ability to leverage resources for development as a messianic gift to humanity – and, therefore, a God-given right that the collective had no right to limit. 

In the past fifty years, and particularly in the past ten, an analogous evolutionary jump in the speed of trade has occurred, pushing individuals to demand more. The protests in Tel Aviv are the best example so far, although the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to be heading in the same direction. In the 1950s through the 1990s, Israeli youth knew that they were burdened by their choice to live in Israel — by the national service, the taxes, the special government deals with unproductive segments of the population. But with borders closed, and hostile neighbors, they took such burdens for granted as a means of survival. Then came the 1990s, and the 2000s, and expanded Israeli trade with the Near East, Europe and Far East, and Israel's economic isolation is a faint dream of the past, as are the justifications for protectionism. At the same time, nearly every Israeli young adult is updated minute by minute about the economic opportunities in other countries, as well as the ridiculously high concentration of wealth that Capitalism afforded the richer segments of Israeli society, thanks to protectionism and lack of government regulation for economic concentration. This led to a sense of cognitive dissonance: young Israelis want to live in Israel, to serve their collective, but most of those same individuals protesting have the education and drive to enable them to immigrate from Israel with minimal burden. All of a sudden, they understood they could get more elsewhere – but they decided instead to fight for the justification to stay in Israel. 

Israeli society wants the youth to succeed, which is why 87% of Israel's population supported the protests and three times the population of Israel's largest city, Tel Aviv, took to the streets in early September. In time, once the fires of American partisan politics die down, so too will the American people want the youth to succeed, because it just doesn't make sense for a society, its laws and its military to defend the rights of a minority's minority to control resources that should be available to all citizens. But making adjustments in the current system will not be enough. It's time for an economic evolutionary leap. 

Mercantilism believed that the economy was in service of the state, of the king. The better the kingdom did, Mercantilism proposed, the better the kindgom's subjects fared. Capitalism rejected this notion, and sought to free the productive class from the state, saying that the state will do best if business is able to leverage its capital in the ways of comparative advantage. The citizens of the state, Capitalism suggested, would benefit from innovations in the creative process and gain in public works thanks to increasing amounts of taxation. But we are at the dawn of a new era: an era where we understand that Capitalism may have provided extra fuel to firms, but it was unable to holistically improve the lot of the people. While firms pushed ahead to create new modes of transportation, computation and healing, they also disregarded the commons in toxic run-off, quarterly downsizing, and myopic reallocation of employment policies. And as the people were able to learn more about how their energy as producers or consumers were being misallocated by firms, they demanded more. 

It is too early to tell what the next system will be, but I am willing to make a few bets as to its fundamental tenants. First, the next economic system will seek to free the economy from business, enabling unaligned individuals to contribute their personal energies to collective projects that would provide nearly unlimited energy and creativity for the benefit of the public. We're already seeing bits and pieces of that come through crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, and crowdcreation engines such as Quirky. 

Second, the next economic system will demand a non-linear accounting system, one that takes into account the massive growth in stakeholders that any business now has. Previously, a 'bottom line' was gotten by comparing revenue to expenses. Recently, a 'triple bottom line' was proposed to take into account financial, social and environmental impact. The triple bottom line is a good step forward, but I'm willing to bet that we'll soon be taking into account a much more complex set of factors before deciding if a venture is 'worthwhile.'

Third, the next economic system will focus on cooperation and reuse, as opposed to patent walls and litigation. The generation of children growing up using wikis and sharing files will not understand why generations before them were so obsessed with intellectual property control. And yet if we are to incentivize invention, we will need to dream up a much more holistic royalty scheme that will enable inventors to benefit when their ideas are remixed and mashed into new developments. 

Last, we will only be able to fully emerge into the next economic system once we have a global understanding of a firm's responsibilities. The borders of countries that defined the last era are legal fictions that made sense while we lived in a world of limited communication and transportation. Tomorrow's global world will need new controls and supports if we are to keep peace and order, and firms will have to interface directly with that superstructure if humanity's creative potential is to be at the core of governance. 

Have other ideas for what's next for an economic paradigm? Please do share. 

Israel: Have We Lost That Loving Feeling?

(This article contains the remarks I was planning to share at the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) General Assembly, when I was invited to speak on a panel on the youth's connection to Israel. When, due to budget considerations, JFNA reduced the size of the panel, I decided to turn the ideas into a short article instead.)

Sometimes, I've found that I can get so wrapped up in a problem that I lose perspective on how others have dealt with something similar, or even how I have dealt with the same type of problem in the past. I'm sure others join me in falling for this 'blinder effect,' and in hindsight we wished we were able to learn more from our past experience and get outside perspective. Instead of having to figure out how to get get online or even soothe a relationship that had soured each time all over again just doesn't make sense. But unfortunately, we often aren't able to get that perspective in the moment, and it seems that we humans, and especially we Jews, are less able to gain perspective when it comes to those problems that strike at our very core: our continuity, and specifically how our youth chose to carry on, or not carry on, the values we hold dear.

The issue of Israel has particularly is at the center of current debates about Jewish identity, as it should be, considering that Israel was the central project of the Jewish People over the past century. But often discussions about Israel catch us with our blinders on. So before we address the present day and the relationship or lack thereof that our youth have to Israel, let's try to gain some perspective by looking back a bit to remember the origins of our current relationship to Israel and Jewish identity.

In the early 1920s a new movement started to grow in North America, especially among the young Jews who were of the first or second generation to be born on her shores. Zionism was a rebellious movement that rejected the reigning assimilationist ideology of previous generations of American Jews, and inspired young Jews to imagine themselves as a nation like other nations around the world. This collectivist impulse was as new as nationalism in Europe, and even newer amongst American Jews. Before, Am Yisrael was an abstract entity; in those times, Am Yisrael became a collective actor deserving of a homeland where it may create a foundation for a shared future, just as other people's yearned for self expression following the breakdown of Empires at the dusk of the first World War.

At first, the mainstream of the Jewish community rejected Zionism, and Zionist membership in the 1920s and 1930s never rose above 20% of the general population. But in the century that followed, Am Yisrael went through more as a collective than many peoples go through in a Millenia. First, Jews were given access to the great heights of Western society. Then, fear and loathing of the Jew drove the world to look the other way as six million human beings were led to their deaths in broad daylight. Shortly thereafter, a people without a State for two thousand years resumed sovereignty in their land. Only once the State was created did the Jews of America fully grasp what had transpired. It was the dream of Zionism and the guilt of being bystanders during the Holocaust that led to a movement among American Jewry: a non-Zionist love for Israel that expected every Jew to feel a special connection to the State of Israel so long as their heart did beat.

But in the past 20 years, the generations that grew did not share the same attachment to a State far across the ocean. Despite free and discounted trips to see the Land of their Forefathers, the general trend seems to be in the same direction: away from the type of connection our community leaders and philanthropists feel is the "right" connection to have, which often is summarized as ‘where-ever I stand I stand with Israel.’ Instead, our youth is used to weighing in with their personal opinion on issues of interest, through ‘liking’ comments of their friends to pitching in their own thoughts on anything from the choices their friends make to the policies of their government. Where-ever they stand, it is often in critical distance from others. 

Some claim that the reason my generation, sometimes called Y and sometimes Millenials, do not connect with Israel in the "right way" is due to politics. Stop the occupation, they say, and young Jews will be less dissuaded from supporting Israel. Others say that it is because we focus on the wrong things. Instead of focusing on the conflict or the geopolitical significance of the State, we should focus on the culture, the music, the traditions, and my generation will find our connection there. And yet others fault the education of the youth, blaming community leaders, rabbis, for not being pro-Israel enough, and implying that only the Orthodox retain the righteousness of the Jewish cause.

I think there is some truth to all of these opinions, except for the third, but as they say, a little knowledge might sometimes be a dangerous thing. A person with an incomplete picture might think they know what they are doing, and due to partial information come to the wrong conclusion with the best intentions.

As someone who has lived amongst and observed on a daily basis my peers, through my life and my work to present, the one thing that is clear is that the present is in no way like the past. The very way we identify ourselves in the world has changed. The word 'friend,' that core word that relates who we are through who we feel emotionally close to, has been altered. The way we communicate, share our experiences, and through our experiences describe our identity has been irrevocably changed by the advance of social media.

Our collective communication and collective identification has changed too. In the era where the Arab Spring can sweep across a region overnight, where the Rothschild Tent protests in Tel Aviv can share the same aesthetic markers of protests with Occupy Wall Street across the Atlantic, it should be clear that the youth of today are less connected to a certain space than ever before. Think of yourself ten years ago and today. Ten years ago, how much would you know about the daily affairs of friends and family that were over 150 miles away? Compare that number to the ones you know about today, from status updates and tweets. I'm willing to bet the difference in number is a factor of 10: that you now keep in touch with ten times as many people far away as you did in 2001, when Hotmail and AOL were the leading ways to connect over the Internet.

In this era, therefore, the fundamental way that humans connect with each other is different. Just as the early Zionists were responding to a different paradigm in their time (nationalism), the youth of today are responding to a globalized, networked world that our older generations are only beginning to understand the implications of. And as we agreed previously, since it makes no sense to try and solve each problem as if it is unique – and makes more sense to learn from previous experiences and the experiences of others – a new, more systematic approach is needed if we truly want to strengthen a Jewish identity and relationship with Israel that will last throughout the social evolutionary leap of the 21st century.

While I do not have a definitive idea as to what the right approach to strengthen continuity and the youth's relationship to Israel is, here are a few thoughts as to what the effects of the 21st century will be on our youth and what our community should do or not do if it wants to ensure our youth share our values and live in a better future.

First, it is clear that there is strong cognitive dissonance between the values the Jewish People holds dear and the political situation in Israel. Such a clash is bound to happen when values developed over the two thousand years of powerlessness meet up with the reality of sovereignty and military action. Instead of berating youth for pointing out those contradictions, the community should encourage the youth to explore them, to delve into the complexities of power and politics and to understand the challenges of living as a free people in the world. We should ask more of our youth, exposing them to the conflicting motivations and goals of the parties in the region, so that they can offer solutions and roll up their sleeves to get involved. This means more opportunities to see the underbelly of Israel, and not just 10-day party buses. Just as adults need to make hard choices to keep their families safe, so too do States and sovereign Peoples. Likewise, not every decision an adult makes is the right one. If we cannot approach the Occupation in a mature way, we should not be educating youth.

Second, we need to learn from other Peoples who have been wrestling with the State/Diaspora divide alongside us. The Basques, for example, developed their Euskadi movement at the same exact time as the Zionists, and since then have been through a history almost as challenging as our own. So too have the Irish, the Indian diaspora, the Sikh's and others. Maintaining identity and culture in the 21st century is not a burden we carry alone, and we should share information and learn from others.

Third, and most important, we need to invest in deeper thought about why this is all worth it in the first place. When the Zionists started their rebellion, the mainstream of the Jewish People rejected them, and even demonized them, for what they thought was stirring up trouble. When history justified the Zionist yearning, it became evident that their underlying philosophy and understanding of the world was essential and existentially relevant. Today, however, if you ask our leading communal professionals why being Jewish matters in the grand scheme of things, you generally will get one answer: fixing the world. So how is Israel connected to fixing the world? Why is maintaining a sovereign Jewish identity important if fixing the world is our overarching goal as a community? And is fixing the world the right driving value we should be aspiring to as a community?

We are at the gateway to a new world, and without recognizing what the true challenge is, we will not be able to learn how to overcome it. Instead of getting bogged down in yester-century's system of classification and ideological debate, we need to think both deeper and broader about the issue of Jewish identity and the role the State of Israel has to anchor it. Above all, however, we must remember Simon Rawidowicz's insight: although we may think of ourselves as an Ever Dying People, no People has been able to survive through so many of history's twists and turns as our own. Or to quote the Israeli poet Meir Ariel, if we were able to overcome Pharaoh, we'll overcome this too.