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Notes -
I've thought about why this is. The simplest explanation would be Israel's paucity of natural resources. Other explanations include the high level of civil strife, necessary defense spending, sanctions, and of course the wastage due to religious study.
I think these explanations contribute but are not the main factor to Israel's underperformance relative to U.S. Jews.
My preferred explanation is that, for high IQ people, scale matters. Take a person with an IQ of 160, put them on a tiny isolated island, and there is very little advantage to their high IQ. Put them in New York City and they can leverage networks of influence that will greatly amplify their talents. This, to my mind, explains why U.S. Jews have an income far in excess of Israeli Jews.
The weight of Israeli defense spending functions fairly similarly to the weight of demographic age in other high IQ countries(Israel is literally the only one with above replacement fertility, isn't it? I mean unless you count Argentina), so we might have a natural experiment soon.
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