The Central Bureau of Statistics announced it is changing its criteria for calculating unemployment. On the new list: Arab communities. Off the list: IDF conscripts who are now considered “employed” . The result: A quantum leap of 20 percent.
This isn’t even an April Fools joke. I wish it was. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) sheepishly announced that the criteria it’s been using to calculate the unemployment ratio in Israel don’t match the ones used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which Israel insisted upon joining two years back. Now that the CBS intends to switch over to the OECD’s standards, Israel’s unemployment rate goes from 5.6 to 6.5 percent practically overnight. As Globes reported this morning (Hebrew), CBS announced as recently as 28 February Israel had 174,000 unemployed. Beginning Friday, Israel has 227,000. In its statement (.pdf), the bureau suggests that the overall trend of gently sloping unemployment stays largely true, but the overall unemployment ratio is much higher than admitted to begin with.
Does any of it have anything to do with racism and militarism? Why, I’m very glad you asked. Globes suggest that the bulk of the change has been caused by the addition of “some one hundred communities that were not included in earlier CBS surveys.” The paper speculates that these communities, which Psagot Investment House analyst Uri Grienfield tactfully describes as “smaller, more peripheral and with a tendency to lower levels of employment than the big cities” are largely Arab villages and towns. Such forgetfulness has been demonstrated by Israeli media often enough – I vividly recall poverty indexes on TV news that would omit the country’s poorest 10 communities, all of them Arab, from their ratings, year after year after year – but it’s the first time, to my memory, that a government institution admits to similar selective amnesia.
“If indeed they failed to include certain Arab localities, this throws into doubt past data collection on unemployment in Arab community by CBS, considering how carefully unemployment is regularly monitored among both the Arab and Haredi communities, both traditionally underemployed,” my colleague Dahlia tells me when I consult her if the news were as bizarre as they seem . “In addition to civil society groups, the CBS itself tracks (.pdf) Arab unemployment levels. So it is hard to imagine how the CBS suddenly forgot about its own data.”
If this wasn’t enough, it seems the actual unemployment ratio is even higher, because the amended data lists all of the IDF – conscripts, NCOs and officers alike – as “employed.” Considering conscripts are paid something like NIS 350 ($95) a month and sustain themselves largely on army grub (=Israeli and American taxpayers money), on their parents’ income and on jobs that pay under-the-table, it seems they fall short of several economic aspects associated with employment’s role in an economy (giving vs. taking from public coffers and consumer spending power instantly come to mind).
While the CBS is keen to present this development as nothing out of the ordinary (they didn’t even hold a press conference, simply slipping the statement onto their website just before the weekend), few appear to be buying it. Psagot says it has updated its 2012 unemployment forecast for Israel to 7.5 percent. A “senior financial source” in Jerusalem told Globes that the top financial administrators of the country were “stunned” by the news and that the Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, is “asking for an explanation” of the change. As the paper notes, all this might help to explain why hundreds of thousands of Israelis went out to the streets last summer despite a rosy picture of the economy persistently painted by the government.
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ya3cov
There’s no institutional racism in Israel.
APRIL FOOLS!
sh
“all this might help to explain why hundreds of thousands of Israelis went out to the streets last summer”
Sure does.
Bill Pearlman
I honestly don’t see the point. Unemployment is a world wide problem right now
Sol
Besides, Pearlman, they’re not Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, or even real citizens, so what’s the difference, right?
Michael W.
At least it is still better than in America, the land of opportunities.
Bill Pearlman
The Arabs in Israel lack the skill sets for a high tech world. They can’t work in a security field because they are not loyal to the country. And they are a crime problem. Which affects everything.
AMIR.BK
William, pray tell, what inherent quality of Israeli Arabs deprives them of the necessarily skill-set requires to find employment in the ‘high tech world’?
directrob
“The Arabs in Israel lack the skill sets for a high tech world.”
.
Bill this sounds more than a little racist to me … it is also untrue.
Bill Pearlman
I suspect its because science and math would cut into religious studies. Maybe they can’t work with women, much less take orders from them. Maybe it would lessen the victim pathology. You tell me.
Bill Pearlman
When you look at what Jews have contributed to the advancement of the human condition vs. Moslems all you have to do is look at the evidence
aristeides
Just don’t count up the evidence, racist – you’d have to use Arabic numbers.
Rodrigo
A .9% difference in the unemployment rate due to a change in measuring criteria is a non issue.
You should instead be celebrating the low unemployment in Israel considering both 5.6% and 6.5% are ridiculously low levels compared to most other developed countries (US – 8.3%, France – 10%, Spain – 20%+)
As for the conscripts being considered employed. It isn’t that they are employed, but that they are outside the labor force in the same way as students at universities and the retired. This is again a standard and universally accepted way of determining the unemployment rate.
Bill Pearlman
Thank you Rodrigo. This involves economics and statistics. Doesn’t really fall into the evil Jews category
Rodrigo
Aresteides, oh be quiet. I wouldn’t need the Arabic numbers to count the number of Arab Nobel prize winners outside the Nobel peace prize. I could do that by using less than half the fingers on one hand.
Frankly I think part of the reason for the record of terrible Arab academic and intellectual achievements is an issue with the language of Arabic itself. Kids learn their own local Arabic dialect to communicate with other people in the area. Once they get to school they are basically forced learn a foreign language (Modern Standard Arabic) before they can read and write and study more advanced topics. That can’t contribute to a love of reading and writing from an early age. MSA was a terrible idea..
sh
Speaking of maths, ever heard of Averroes, know what nation invented algebra? Clue: al jabr is Arabic for equation. Shame hasbaragoons don’t do their homework properly.
Rodrigo
SH, This is a silly discussion, but I must point out that if you need to look back 800 years to find significant Arab advances in science and math there might be a problem with the modern Arab world.
It is even worse when someone like Aresteides is forced to enter this argument by taking credit for Arabs for inventing a number system whose actual inventors were Indian.
Lisa Goldman
An Egyptian engineer, Prof Mohamed Sanad has been selected as the overall winner of the Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA), bagging $ 100,000 in prize money for inventing the first small internal integrated micro strip antennas for mobile phones.
http://eldahshan.com/2012/03/29/as-always-no-one-hears-about-this-egyptian-chosen-best-innovator-in-africa/
Rodrigo
Lisa, you could have done better than the Innovation Prize for Africa, not really a continent known for scientific progress. I am sure there are also scientific and academic prizes in the Arab world you could find..
You could have pointed to Ahmed Zewail, who is the only Arab who won the Nobel prize in Physics, Chemistry or Medicine, although admittedly he lives and has done all of his research in the US.
directrob
As far as “Arabs” in Israel the main reason for them on average to have a lesser education lies in the education system and probably economic differences. As far as I know Palestinians are eager to let their children (male and female) have an education. The same “Arabs”, male and female do quite well in European schools.
.
Anyhow this whole discussion is utterly racist.
Bill Pearlman
Leftists are amazingly ignorant of both capitalism and human nature. When there was a run of Israeli farmers getting killed by Arab workers what did they do. They made the logical response, they automated and brought in Filipinos, Thai’s , whatever. Its the logical rational response. Arabs don’t serve in the military, they don’t contribute to national defense. Why would a company in the defense industry hire them. Why would any company risk sensitive information by letting a sector of the population who wants to tear down the country access. You can’t agitate against the country, work against the country, and then complain when things don’t go your way.
Lisa Goldman
Rodrigo, thanks for acknowledging that your original claim of a dearth of Arab innovators is erroneous.
Lisa Goldman
William P – Arabs do serve in the Israeli army.
Bill Pearlman
Always individual exceptions and they are few and far between. And I’m not talking about the Druze
Lisa Goldman
And William P you’re wrong – again. Don’t expect to be taken seriously if you don’t know your basic facts.
Rodrigo
Lisa, haha. We found two Arab innovators out of a population of 200M and not a single world class university and you think the Arab world is innovative? Come on… I know Arabs that would admit that the Arab world is completely backwards when it comes to science and technology. You don’t have to try to be more Catholic than the Pope here..
Lisa Goldman
Rodrigo, when you say ‘Arab world,’ what do you mean?
XYZ
This news item will certainly set off a political earthquake in Israel. The readjusting the unemployment rate from 5 to 6% will no doubt mass demonstrations that will not only bring down the government but will end capitalism in Israel and restore socialism here. Dafne Leef and her friends will go to Akirov and drive out all those rich capitalist pigs at gun point and Dafne will decide which people (friends of hers) will get cheap student housing in a desirable area of central Tel Aviv. No doubt some young HADASH activisith will use his background in class struggle to be given the power who decides who gets a telephone and he will only give them to people who deserve them (also friends and relatives of his), just like in the good old socialist days in Israel when it took 5 years go get a telephone, unlike in today’s terrible capitalist system when just any trash off the street can get a phone overnite. We will have a socially just society in which only those who deserve will receive, just as Marx promised.
Rodrigo
Lisa, the Arab World is a reference to the member states of the Arab League.
mya guarnieri
i’d love to see some data about underemployment in israel, as well. i know a number of people who cannot find work commensurate with their education levels or previous work experience.
Felix Reichert
Lack of innovative spiritis nothing intrinsic to the Arab culture(s).
Look at Europe for over 1000 years, look at Japan until only about a 100 years back. Has Europe completely thrown out its cultural roots after enlightenment, has Japan’s culture today nothing to do with Japan’s culture 150 years ago?
I din’t think so.
The reason why people in Arab states often have worse education than in Western countries are entirely political, and economic, and can change practically overnight.
The reason why Palestinians (in Israel & the Occupied Territories) often have worse education is entirely because of Israel’s institutional racism.
Did the Blacks in the US before, let’s say 1960, have a worse education than the average white person because they were black, or because they were massively discriminated against?
Do they today still have worse eductional prowess because they are black (and obviously these blacks must be genetically dumb), or because of the remnants of this institutional racism?
sh
“SH, This is a silly discussion”
.
Not so silly, Rodrigo. Name me Jewish advances in science and maths during the same period. Tell me how many Israeli Nobel Prize-winners have not lived in the United States during some period of their lives. As for Arab innovators today, the list is long, but it’s mainly in the arts not the sciences. It doesn’t work the way you describe it, there are ebbs and flows in every civilization and you’re reading a script not having a discussion.
.
In addition, the tropes you have chosen to bring here have nothing to do with cooked polls, which is what the article was about. We’re hearing concepts like “accidentally overlooked” and it’s getting quite funny. However happily you dismiss it, far from being negligible, the subject threatens to be huge, for it affects the statistics of other things we’ve been patting ourselves on the backs for. Already the day before Stanley Fisher had apoplexy, this appeared in the Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/Business/BusinessNews/Article.aspx?id=264066
XYZ
Felix-
You are giving us the old quasi-Marxist-Progressive line that “really, everybody in the world is the same, and that ‘same’ is what I am, and if there are people who don’t reach the achievements I have decided are the desirable ones, then they are victims of economic or political discrimination, colonialism, racism…etc, etc”.
Did it ever occur to you that people have different values than you? That maybe their view of education is different than yours? Is it possible their life goals are not the same as yours?
There was a an article a few years ago in the New York Times about education in Algeria. The gov’t there decided to cut back French language classes and, instead to increase the number of hours devoted to Qur’anic studies. The gov’t decided that this is more important than Western-type subjects. Does that find favor in your eyes or not? Do you think that will increase or decrease the students ability to master modern math, science, computer skills, etc? If not, how is “colonialism” or “racism” responsible for Algeria’s sovereign decision to have this sort of educational policy?
Bill Pearlman
When you subtract oil production and some low value added textile production from Islamic GDP it doesn’t exactly impress anybody.
Rodrigo
Look, you have already admitted that ‘there are ebbs and flows in every civilization’ by which I assume you mean that at the present moment the Arab World is still ebbing as far as science and technology are concerned. It isn’t a permanent situation as there is nothing inherent in Arab culture that prevents innovation, but given its current incarnation it certainly is not a trend that looks like it is reversing at the moment. Are we done with this silliness?
As for the article we are actually commenting on, it is barely news. Somebody screwed up in previous reporting of data and they are going to get chewed out by the BoI and Fischer. Yes, as the original Globes article says this makes data seem less reliable and may hurt the faith of foreign investors. And yet, a change in the methodology towards OECD standards that changes the underlying rate by less than 1% towards the still relatively low rate of 6.5% is barely news. In a club where Greece is a member like the OECD this kind of open and non-coerced discovery and publication of an error should be awarded a medal.
As for the other article you link to, of course things can work better in Israel. It is too damn expensive and disorganized compared to the US or European states. Heaven forbid Israel decides that everything is perfect and clamps down on people that say otherwise. Hell, then it might look a lot like an average Arab country.
Rodrigo
The previous post was for SH…
Beholder
>Did the Blacks in the US before, let’s say 1960, have a worse education than the average white person because they were black, or because they were massively discriminated against?
During 1960′s there were at least as much Arabs as Jews in the USA. To my knowledge there were no segregation or other limitations on Arabs, not at the time, nor later. Arab countries have much more money than Israel does, but still Arab science is at best few good leaps behind and at best – laughable.
_
Why is that?
_
There are a mere 12 Million Jews in the entire world yet they have received 192 Nobel Prizes.
The Muslims number 1.4 Billion (with a very big “B”)… or 117 times the number of Jews! Based upon this 117:1 Muslim-to-Jewish ratio, one might expect the Muslims to have 22,464 Nobel Laureates.
They have NINE! and one of them [Arafat] is a murderer.
XYZ
Dircectrob makes a good point, Arab students in the US and Europe can do well in the sciences and technology. Then why don’t the Arab countries move ahead in these areas? NOT because of “colonialism” but due to the social structure of those countries. The ties of clan and family. The felt need for someone who reaches a position of authority to hand out jobs he has available to friends and family instead of to the most qualified person.
BTW-this was true in Israel during its corrupt, diseased socialist past. It was called “proteksia”. This is why it took decades for Israeli scientists to win a Nobel Prize….because Israeli institutions were run on a similar basis….hire your friends and relatives, not the best. Fortunately, this attitude has been declining in Israel. Until it disappears in the Arab world (and I don’t if this is happening at all) they won’t advance.
A good example is given in the book by the Egyptian Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz in his book which I think is called “Yes, Honored Sir” which is about the attempt of a simple man who tries to rise to the top of a government office, and the obstacles he encounters because he doesn’t come from a “connected” family.