The NY Jewish Week recently published an article entitled "Resolving the Day School Crisis: It Takes a Mishpocha" that I found to be a bit shortsighted.  In the article, writer Kim Hirsh identifies the central day school crisis as a profound inability to develop self-sustainable financial resource development.  In that regard, she is correct.  Most Jewish day schools "simply lurch from one fiscal crisis to the next" without ever reaping the benefits of teaching so many generations of students about tzedakah (charity).

I think Hirsh's best point is one she skims over: that as the recession hits more and more Jewish families, day schools will be institutions that cater only to the very rich and the few students from lower income brackets that are on scholarship.  The middle class will have no access, especially considering that the middle class is shrinking rapidly anyhow.

I am a product of Jewish day school-I was ‘educated' in lackluster orthodox institutions from kindergarten through high school, and have seen those schools through times of plenty and crisis. Frankly, Hirsh fails to acknowledge that perhaps the day school model is outdated.  If there is not enough funding to support these programs, perhaps the programs themselves need to change. Why continue trying to save troubled institutions, many of which are willing to sacrifice educational quality if it means retaining more students, if they will inevitably meet the same financial challenges in the next fiscal quarter?

I don't foresee the $300 million in endowments that the UJA has proposed materializing out of the ether any time soon, at least not in full.  It would be wrong not to deny Hirsh's assertion that "day school education is essential to ensuring that Judaism survives and thrives in this country."  It is time to stop looking at intensive Jewish education as the magical key to ensuring our children embrace their heritage, and instead focus on empowering them to seek out those ideals on their own.  Give them good educations at secular institutions and they will see clearly the reasons why their parents (and our parents) have thought (in folly) that day schools are the only route through which Jewish adults are shaped and made.

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Stuff happens, even on the weekend somtimes...

• Chinese Democracy is reality (the album, not the concept).
• Doctors at Maywood University are doing tests to determine whether taking Viagra can give athletes an unfair advantage in competition.
• The Presidents of Georgia and Poland claim to have been shot at near the Russian-South Ossetian border on Sunday; Russia denies both of their claims.
• In the "Irrelevance of the Church" department, the Vatican has officially forgiven John Lennon for joking that the Beatles were "Bigger than Jesus." It's a shame Lennon isn't around to laugh about how stupid this is.
• President-Elect Obama is expected to formally announce his economic team today.
• Obama has apparently not been to church since winning the election. Awesome.
• A city in Spain is putting a cemetery to real-life use, as host to energy-generating solar panels.
• White-collar crime's A-list is preparing for the traditional end-of-term pardoning spree as George W. Bush's term in office winds down.
• Eight Israeli teenagers, all immigrants from former Soviet nations, have been given prison sentences for various violent and anti-social neo-Nazi hijinx in Tel Aviv.
• Pakistan has requested a $7.6 billion loan from the IMF to help shore up its ailing economy.
• Parent company NBC-Universal laid off about 10% of The Weather Channel's workforce.
• Colorado Municipal Judge Paul Sacco continues to sentence noise violators to have to listen to music they don't like. Says Sacco, when asked what kind of music the sentences consist of: "Most kids don't want to hear somebody like Glenn Close trying to sing opera."

In case there was any confusion over whether or not Africa was fucked up beyond comprehension, the inflation rate in Zimbabwe has now reached 231,000,000 %. An inflation rate, or anything, of that magnitude is literally beyond comprehension, as in, I have no idea what that even means. Prices must be doubling every couple of seconds; by the time one can even take money out of their pocket to pay for something, the price would have already gone up. 231,000,000 isn't a number, it's a concept, like light years; I have no frame of reference for what 231 million of anything even is. Which is more surprising, the 100-Billion-Dollar Bill, or the presence of food in Africa?

A chronological list of headlines on NewZimbabwe.com, which hails itself as "The best Zimbabwe news site on the world wide web," tells the story as it unfolded:

January. 2007: Zimbabwe's inflation hits 1,593%
March, 2007: RBZ rolls out $5 000 and $50 000 note
April, 2007: Zimbabwe's inflation races to 3,714 percent
August, 2007: Zimbabwe's inflation rockets to 7,634%
August, 2007: RBZ unveils $200,000 dollar bill
September, 2007: Zimbabwe's inflation doubles to 14,850%
October, 2007: How Zimbabwe Lost Control of Inflation

Flash forward and move on to the international press as I assume the NewZimbabwe.com staff has starved to death:

May, 2008: Zimbabwe Inflation Now Over 1 Million Percent (Boston.com)
August, 2008: Zimbabwe Inflation Hits 11,200,000 Percent (CNN.com)
October, 2008: Zimbabwe Inflation Hits 231 Million Percent (Telegraph)

A good name tells a story and identifies the named in some memorable way. And I needed one. Fast. It was late in the evening one night this past May. I was going to my lawyer’s office the next day to sign the papers for the incorporation of my business and I found, much too late for comfort, that the URL for the name I had chosen was already owned by a popular web portal in Korea.

I did what any God-petitioning Jew should have done in the first place: I picked up a copy of the Torah. Pretty soon, I had zeroed in on the story of Joseph (seven fat years, seven lean years) and was reminded of the name that the Pharaoh gave him after interpreting his dreams: Tzafnat Paneach. I chose the latter half of that name and Anglicized it to Panea. My company, Panea Energy Ltd., is in the field of energy storage, so the Egyptian meaning of the name ("storer of grain") made sense. My success also depends upon successfully anticipating the needs of the utilities industry, so I liked the fact that the name also had a mystical Hebrew connection: "Revealer of Hidden Things".

So Panea Energy was born. Now I not only had a name, but I had a story to tell whenever a potential client asked me what the name meant as they glanced at my business card.

Excavation of Egyptian grain silos at Tell Edfu: University of ChicagoI was advised by several people (all Jews) to not choose a “Jewish” name for my company. “They’ll think you’re a religious nut,” my brother told me, for instance.

I’m probably a nut, but nobody has ever accused me of being a religious one, so the suggestion caused surprise. The Bible, I argued, is as valid a source for a company name as the Iliad (Ajax, Midas, etc.) or tree identification books (Sycamore, Juniper, etc.).

As it turns out, my brother’s fears never materialized. I get lots of questions about Panea Energy’s name, but I’ve never gotten the feeling that someone discounted me or the company because of the religious source. In some cases, I’ve come across devout Christians who know the meaning of the name without my telling them and an instant bond is formed. In most other cases, I sense a recognition of my earnestness and gravitas on the part of the questioner as I tell the story of the name.

I’ve been thinking of the real Tzafnat Paneach a lot recently. If only he had been around in 2001 when George Bush took office. His advice (to store the surplus of the good years and dole out those savings in bad years) would have prevented the current crisis. Instead, we find our government doing the exact opposite: borrowing a few trillion dollars from the good years to come to pay off today’s debts. It’s just another example of a Biblical voice being lost amidst the happy whistling of leaders who were sure they were right.

Vladimir Putin: He's learned to prepare for the worstNot everyone ignored Paneach's advice. Vladimir Putin wrote his doctoral thesis prior to his KGB years on how Russia could save cash from years when oil prices are high (Russia gets most of its foreign reserves from fossil fuel sales) and then spend it in years that the price of oil falls. Thus the economy could be insulated from the peaks and valleys of petroleum pricing. As leader of his country, Putin put more than $190 billion into cash reserves. The Moscow stock exchange has crashed even harder than Wall Street, but the government can now swoop in with savings from years past (not more borrowed money like us) and prop up the economy in the hard times to come.

I’m not recommending a Putin-like leadership for our country. But Putin’s forethought—and his correct interpretation of a Biblical story—is going to serve Russia well. Every time we are reminded over the coming years of America’s declining power and Russia’s more prominent role in world affairs, think of Tzafnat Paneach. And hope that our economic leadership of the future is thinking of him too.

Sam Jaffe, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Buisness Success, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

Between the Jewish establishment's imposition of silence and the loosely coupled throng of Jew-hater's who zealously proclaim conspiracy, the discourse over Jews and money is pure zealotry on either side.  The result is a vacuum of alternative perspectives and the absence of any shred of an enlightened public discussion, which only provides fertile soil for a perpetual harvest of rhetorical hate.

That's why Jewcy feels it's critical to highlight voices like Brackman and Jaffe, as we are doing all week, and it's also  why we're very happy that Time magazine just published an article highlighting two Jewish scholars that are publicly filling the vacuum by putting forth an alternative discourse -- one that cites Jewish law as a basis for criticizing the behavior that led to the current financial crisis. The scholars are Yeshiva University economics professor Aaron Levine and Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary. 

The article draws on Jewish scripture (the Torah, the Talmud, and the Mishna) as well as various rabbinical opinions to extrapolate ancient principles relevant to our current economic times:

•Bamboozling the "Blind"
Much Jewish ethical thought flows out of Leviticus 19:14, which reads "Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind." From an early date, rabbis expanded this into a general prohibition on bad advice. In time, it became part of the language specifically regarding loans, mostly regarding the need for witnesses. But Diamond says it now applies to the whole loan debacle and "any expert who tells someone who probably shouldn't take out a mortgage 'you'll be able to do it, no problem.'" There are a lot of financially "blind" people out there, and a lot of people mis-advised them.

•Hidden Flaws and the "Reasonable Man"
Medieval jurists like Maimonides identified a more specific kind of bad advice. They tackled the idea of the "hidden flaw," which, Levine points out, leads directly to a demand for fiscal disclosure. "If you sell an animal, you had to disclose to the buyer what the hidden flaw is," he explains. Not only that: "the disclosure has to be made so that a 'reasonable,' or average man can decide" whether to buy. Once again, almost the entire chain of transactors in the mortgage crisis is guilty: predatory brokers for not alerting working-class borrowers to the fine print; middle-men selling mortgage debt to investment banks sliced and diced into "tranches" that obscure their riskiness; bankers who used hard-to-fathom financial instruments that leave ultimate responsibility for a loan a mystery even to experts. Like many observers, Levine is particularly exercized about credit default swaps, a largely unregulated field since 2000.) And anyone who willfully ignored the fact that real estate prices must eventually come down.

•The Bath House Rule
An extension of the disclosure concern, Diamond reports, was explored by Jews through the unexpected vehicle of marriage law. The tractate Ketubot in the Mishna dictates that a betrothal is valid only if the bride-to-be has no hidden blemishes that would have disqualified the match, had they been public. However, there is a heavy responsibility on the groom: if he has relatives who could have observed the disfigurement by checking out his fiance in the womens' bath but neglected to do have them do so, he can't complain. This suggests (feminist complaints notwithstanding) that culpability in sub-prime crisis does not lie solely on the mortgage broker who glided over the fact that payments ballooned in the third year; but also on the buyer who happily neglected to read the fine print: : "Ignorance of the facts is no defense," Diamond says.

•Morals of the Mark-Up
Leviticus 25 of the Bible explains that you cannot charge the same price for land that is about to become useless (in this case, by reverting to its original tribal ownership) as for a parcel that still has decades of use left. Rabbinic tradition, says Diamond, interpreted that as a check on price-gouging and ruled that nobody should charge more than one-sixth above market value for anything.

[Time Magazine]

Fair play to Hugo Chávez: he’s not the sort of man to let pesky obstacles like the laws of economics derail his vision for turning Venezuela into a socialist utopia. A couple of typically bombastic pronouncements over the weekend confirm that Hugo is happy on his chosen path and not for turning.

The government maintains strict price controls on foodstuffs such as milk and bread in an effort to ensure that poor citizens have access to daily staples, but the unintended consequence - as even a freshman economics major sitting hungover in a morning lecture daydreaming of pussy could have told you – is that, despite being one of South America’s richest nations, food shortages are now a familiar feature of everyday life, as farmers prefer to scrape a living selling their produce in neighbouring countries, where prices are higher.

Chávez’ response was a masterstroke. (All that coke must be good for the brain after all.) “If there’s a producer that refuses to sell milk to the government and sells it instead at a higher price to a private company, we will expropriate their farm,” said Mr Chávez on his Sunday television programme, Aló Presidente [“Hello, Mr President!”] as he inaugurated a state milk processing plant. “If we must bring in the army, we will do so” he added.

Nationalization of farms? Bravo, Hugo! That’ll put bread on the shelves! Indeed, for an idea so elegant in its simplicity, one wonders why no-one’s ever thought of it before. What? Oh.

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In 2002, Tony Blair’s wife caused controversy by expressing some sympathy for the ‘plight’ of Palestinian suicide bombers, just hours after a bus bomb in Jerusalem killed 19 and injured over 40. (Whatever happened to suicide attacks in Israel, anyway? It’s like someone built a wall around the country.) “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up,” Cherie Blair said, “you are never going to make progress.”

Despite the fury at her remarks, she was doing no more than expressing the sort of view that is common in polite society in this country. Even among those genuinely and utterly opposed to the use of violence as a tactic in the Palestinians’ struggle for statehood, there is a widespread view that suicide bombing is the inevitable last resort of the poor, the dispossessed, and the hopeless. Though no moderate himself, London mayor Ken Livingstone echoed the thoughts of many when he said in July 2005 that while Israel has fighter jets and planes, Palestinians “only have their bodies” and “no other way to fight back” - this from a man whose city had just suffered its first suicide bombing three weeks previously. 

The idea that Palestinians do not have access to weapons is not one that need detain us long. But the belief that terrorism generally, and suicide bombing specifically, grow almost organically out of the nexus of political frustration and - crucially - economic deprivation, has become a commonplace, to the extent that even George Bush now enlists the war on terror as justification for signing up to ambitious foreign aid and poverty relief programs. Raise educational standards and give young people opportunities, the argument goes, and fewer of them will be tempted into the arms of the jihadists.

Well, maybe. But this conventional wisdom is challenged by a new book, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism, by Princeton's Alan Krueger. In this month's American magazine Krueger, er, explodes the myth of suicide bomber as undereducated and materially deprived victim of circumstances. On the contrary:

The available evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate educa­tion as important causes of support for terrorism or participation in terrorist activities. Such explana­tions have been embraced almost entirely on faith, not scientific evidence.

Krueger’s thesis is based on a wide variety of sources. Prior to writing this book, he had studied hate crimes in the Germany of the 1990s and found no link between socioeconomic background and the incidence of violent attacks against foreigners. Drawing on this experience, Krueger turned first to global opinion surveys on support for terrorism, and then to those who actually participated in it – Palestinian suicide bombers and Hezbollah militants, and even members of Al-Qaeda.

In all cases, the research pointed the same way. Suicide bombers are far more likely to be from relatively well-to-do backgrounds than the average citizen, more likely to have a high school education, or even college educated. There’s a lot more in Krueger’s article that repays further reading but, as an economist, his thesis is clear; in the fight against terrorism, it is pointless to focus on the supply side. There will always be those who are willing to die for a cause, whether it’s because of nationalism, fanaticism or their personal circumstances. 

If we address one motivation and thus reduce one source on the supply side, there remain other motivations that will incite other people to terror.

That suggests to me that it makes sense to focus on the demand side, such as by degrading terrorist organizations’ financial and technical capabili­ties, and by vigorously protecting and promoting peaceful means of protest, so there is less demand for pursuing grievances through violent means. Policies intended to dampen the flow of people willing to join terrorist organizations, by contrast, strike me as less likely to succeed.

Perhaps it’s the phraseology that tempts so many people to think of the suicide bomber as dispossessed victim, using his own body as a last resort when all else has failed. The idea of honourable suicide, while it certainly exists in Western culture, has never been particularly deeply embedded in our psyche.

Catastrophic professional failures might in times past have been 'resolved' with a pearl-handled revolver in a locked room; nowadays such people won’t even resign without being dragged kicking and screaming towards the exit.  In the modern material world, suicide is, almost by definition, an act of hopelessness, carried out by those who are deeply miserable with their lives. We feel an instinctive sympathy for the suicide; horror at the forces that must have driven them to an act of such shuddering finality. As Karol Sheinin correctly points out elsewhere on these pages, when we look at the plight of ordinary Gazans, it is a hard-hearted observer indeed who does not feel the most profound despair and sympathy for their wretched plight. The idea that suicide can be born not of hopelessness and deprivation but of fanaticism and hatred is such an alien one to our way of thinking that we clutch at familiar tropes instead.

I think the time for such lazy thinking is past. I don’t imagine that the phrase “suicide bomber” began life as a euphemism, but it certainly reads as one nowadays. Far better, I think, Christopher Hitchens’ favoured formulation, “suicide murderers”. The suicide may be central to their ideology, but it’s the murder that’s the principal sin in mine. Sure, it’s a heavily loaded term, but if we can’t use pointed language to describe people willing to immolate themselves and innocent civilians in the name of religion, then we all have bigger problems anyway.

Jonathan Chait picks up on Rudy's laissez-faire economics:

Giuliani... is not indifferent to the plight of the uninsured. He actually seems to revel in it:

 

I don't like mandating health care. I don't like it because it erodes what makes health care work in this country--the free market, the profit motive. A mandate takes choice away from people. We've got to let people make choices. We've got to let them take the risk--do they want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because, ultimately, if they don't, well, then, they may not be taken care of.

Where does this bizarrely punitive view of the health care system come from? It apparently arises from Giuliani's experience with welfare reform, which he constantly likens to health care. "You don't start off by promising you're going to insure everybody," he warned earlier this year. "It's the same mistake the Democrats made with welfare." So providing health coverage to the uninsured will make them irresponsible.

[...]

Giuliani also thinks that insulating people from the costs of sickness or injury will make them more likely to get sick or injured. "There is no incentive to wellness," he complains. 

Very true. Not only can't we help those who can't help themselves, but they just want to get the fucker over with already and die of some wasting disease.

 

 

Via the blog of the Adam Smith Institute, here are three questions you can use to evaluate pretty much any government program, no matter how big or small:

1. At what cost?

2. Compared to what?

3. How do you know?

Beautiful.

Hernando de SotoForget about a glorious future in which the global economic order is overthrown and the fat cats lie down with the lambs. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is more interested in what he can accomplish within the parameters of the world as it actually exists. For the past quarter-century, De Soto has been fighting global poverty through a simple and pragmatic plan to give poor squatters the deeds to the properties they’re squatting in. A curious blend of pro-market capitalist and down-and-dirty activist, de Soto has single-handedly improved the lot of Lima’s indigents. ...

[Note: The following obit was lifted with impunity from Snarksmith by the editor of that site who doesn't know a thing about market economics.]

Uncle MiltyMilton Friedman, who died last night at age 94, today seems like such a always-was sage of economics and politics that it's hard for us to appreciate how deeply hated he and his fellows at the University of Chicago were in their heyday. Their vision of governance based upon individual choice and market-driven policies today seem like common sense, but at the time were radical.

When I visited the University years ago, my tour guide pointed out an huge, abstract metal sculpture composed of intewoven steel blobs, like a freestanding unbound lava lamp. It occupied a corner space on a block otherwise occupied by a tall white building, which we were informed once housed the firebrand economics department. Months after installing the sculpture, the university discovered that the artist who'd been commissioned for the sculpture, a devoted Communist, had calculated the declination of the sun so that the sculpture would cast a large hammer-and-sickle shaped shadow on the building every year on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. For a time, the university considered removing the sculpture. Instead, they moved the economists elsewhere -- and gave the building to the history department. The move, on an institutional level, symbolized the way the Chicago School was able to suffer the abuse of its rivals and often wind up with the last laugh.

Friedman was a champion of liberty and reason who transcended his discipline. Unencumbered by common assumptions and rebelling against state authority, he was in another sense a Freed Man. In a tragic irony, his two great achievements almost contradict each other. Friedman made his name by filling in the holes in an economic theory that had become the basis of bad economic policy. He also founded a school of policy which, in the hands of the Republican party, has become very much the opposite of what he intended.