I considered rewriting his first two paragraphs, replacing "Jews" with "whites" and updating the numbers accordingly, but then thought better of it. Instead I will offer this:
Broooks quotes Steven L. Pease "The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based."
1) While I acknowledge the importance of learning in Judaism, I find it a bit odd to claim that a religion with 613 commandments is not "rite-based"
2) These were the same values of the original Puritan settlers in New England - in fact they even saw themselves as modern day Israelites, chosen by God to go into an unknown land and build a city upon a hill. They rejected the Catholic rituals of the Anglican church, and to this day Boston is a city whose message is "you should be smarter." (http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html) Furthermore, U.S. progressivism grew out of the Unitarian church at Harvard and the Transcendentalists, both in New England.
Essentially all appeals to culture as an explanation are "X does Y, because they do. We have no convincing explanation at to why, but ??? is unsatisfying so we're putting down the reason as 'culture'." For this argument at much greater length, see "Making Common Sense of Japan", which is sadly out of print. (I go back and forth on how much stock I put in it.)
Speaking of which: if book learning and rejection of religious rites makes startups, then you all should be working for Japan, China, or Russia by now, and I should be getting drunk or whatever it is us papists do when not steeping ourselves in dogma. ;) This of course invites the cultural non-explanation: well, granted we did just say that book learning mattered, but there is another offsetting feature of Japanese/Chinese/Russian culture which means it doesn't quite work for them. Oh, except you've got stats which say that Japan actually does have a lot of startups? No problem -- it's what you would expect given their culture and all.
This reminds me of Nassim Taleb's piece about his discussion on the Black Swan theory[1] with an Italian colleague. The colleague argues that he would not have come up with the theory had he grown up in a Protestant culture because of its Platonic tendencies. Suffice it to say, Taleb uses hard evidence to prove such causality doesn't exist.
In Outliers[2], Malcolm Gladwell shows why Jewish lawyers tend to be more successful. A few decades ago, it was difficult for Jews to find work at the top Wall Street firms because of the WASP[3] tradition. So instead they established their own firms and handled work that the WASP firms refused to touch, such as corporate takeovers. This work later became big in the 80's, and the Jewish firms were the ones that had all the experience, so the money went there.
It would be easy (and naive) to attribute the success of Jewish lawyers to their cultural heritage, but Gladwell's explanation is much more convincing, and he actually uses data to back his assertions up. I do think culture influences mindsets, but I also think it's practically impossible to discover how it does so. Arguments like the author's are absurd. However, it is fascinating how successful Jews tend to be overall, as pointed out in the article. I wonder what alternative explanations there are.
Agreed that it's impossible to come up with a single concrete, satisfying answer to these questions. However we're not building a criminal case - it's more of a civil case, where the side with the preponderance of evidence wins. In that vein, two books that I found enjoyable were "Albion's Seed" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed) which details how cultural differences in four areas of England manifested themselves in colonial America, with cultural consequences to this day; and "A Farewell to Alms" (http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet...) which attempts to explain why England was the first country to escape the "Malthusian Trap", enabling the industrial revolution.
I wonder if you've read Roy Andrew Miller's
"Japan's modern myth: the language and beyond" and what you thought of it. I know next to nothing about Japan and the Japanese, but I was very much impressed by this book when I read it a few years ago, and its approach to some of Japan's myths seems to resonate with how "Making Common Sense of Japan" is described.
The Jewish tradition may be learning-based, but it's ideas about learning are extremely deferential & scholastic way. A Jewish scholar can quote sages the debates that they had.
If I had to use common sense to guess what a traditional Jewish education would qualify for, I would guess lawyers.
Anyway, this is all very theoretical. Most Jews do not receive a traditional Jewish education and most of those in the Tel Aviv startup scene are probably at least 2nd generation seculars or more.
The article overlooked something that I think is important: Israelis have a culture that fosters a strong competitive spirit. However, it's not the sort of competitive spirit that encourages lone-wolf style thinking - they're excellent team players.
I think that a lot of the traits that you get from living in a place that requires you to always be ready to fight like hell for survival leak into everything else.
I agree[1] with "most of those in the Tel Aviv startup scene are probably at least 2nd generation seculars or more."
When I was in Israel there were quite a few flavours of Israeli securalism. There is quite a strong communist sentiment here, a neo-agrarian sentiment there. Non jewish stuff abounds with a lot of Humanism and the ultimate fence sitting home base of Bahá'í Faith[2]
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[1] I don't esp agree with the first statement.
The scolasticism you describe seems to be referring to Hasidic-Yeshiva type Jewish Education. My personal Jewish upbringing was quite removed from that, but theres so few of us we also know the Yeshiva types well. From my experience of that style I would say that Yeshivites would yield less of the top rolecall that seems to be the evidence trotted out by this article.
Broooks quotes Steven L. Pease "The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based."
1) While I acknowledge the importance of learning in Judaism, I find it a bit odd to claim that a religion with 613 commandments is not "rite-based"
2) These were the same values of the original Puritan settlers in New England - in fact they even saw themselves as modern day Israelites, chosen by God to go into an unknown land and build a city upon a hill. They rejected the Catholic rituals of the Anglican church, and to this day Boston is a city whose message is "you should be smarter." (http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html) Furthermore, U.S. progressivism grew out of the Unitarian church at Harvard and the Transcendentalists, both in New England.