The Missing Solidarity of Israeli High-Tech

Israeli prices are tolerable on a large salary and brutal on a small one. That sentence describes a country that has effectively split in two, and I want to write about the half I belong to.

The Divide

The people who influence government here are the affluent and the established — the ones buying apartments, working in air-conditioned offices with benefits and catered lunches, and holding the kind of jobs that make the cost of living an inconvenience rather than a crisis.

Everyone else struggles to rent, let alone buy, and struggles with the ordinary cost of a week's food. The gap is not subtle and it is not new.

What functions here is a kind of divide and conquer, though I do not think anyone designed it. The part of the population with the resources to apply political pressure is precisely the part that does not need to.

The Thing I Actually Object To

In principle you could lift everyone into high-tech and raise the general standard of living. In practice the economy has not done it, has not come close, and there is no plausible path by which it would.

So we live with the split. And what I object to is not the split itself — that is an economic outcome with many causes — but the absence of solidarity across it.

I have not seen the high-tech population organise to pressure the government on any of this. Not once, at any scale. We are politically active on other things, some of them important. On the cost of living for people earning a third of what we earn, there is nothing.

The Honest Part

Would fixing this reduce our affluence? Yes. Not enormously, but yes — redistribution comes from somewhere and it would come from us.

I think it should be done anyway. Through taxation or any other mechanism; the technical form is a detail and I have no strong view on it. What exists now is unfair, and the unfairness is not discussed.

What fills the space where the discussion should be is a diffuse capitalist assumption that everyone gets what is coming to them. It is rarely stated outright, because stated outright it is hard to defend.

The Question Underneath

Let me state it plainly, because everything else here reduces to it.

If someone is less intelligent than you — if he did not study mathematics or computer science or electrical engineering, if he simply lacks the aptitude — should he struggle enormously more than you do?

Is that fair?

My answer is no. Not because effort does not matter, and not because I think ability is irrelevant to what people earn. But the magnitude of the gap has no relationship to any difference in merit I can identify. I did not choose my aptitude for abstraction any more than someone else chose the absence of it. We are being paid vastly differently for a difference neither of us selected.

I hold this position and I have not acted on it beyond writing about it, which is worth admitting. But I notice that the question is not even asked, and the not-asking is doing work. A society that never puts the question cannot arrive at an uncomfortable answer.