Ran Abramitzky > Quotes

“Ideology serves to both increase the value of the inside option, thereby alleviating brain drain, and enhance cooperative norms within the group, thereby alleviating free-riding.”
― Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

“The kibbutz experience suggests that income equality does not come for free. What you gain in a safety net, you lose in individual incentives; but if you raise incentives, inequality follows.”
― Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

“An astonishing 77 percent of Indian-born immigrants to the United States hold a college degree today, compared to only 8 percent of residents of India.”
― Ran Abramitzky, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success

“Kibbutz members were required to give the collective all their private property, including clothing and other personal items. All decisions were made collectively, from small things like what the members should wear and when they could get new shoes, all the way to what food the members would eat in the dining hall, what tasks and jobs the members would perform, and whether and what the members could study outside the kibbutz. Even the showers were communal (separate for men and women).”
― Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

“children of immigrants from nearly every country in the world, including from poorer countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Laos, are more upwardly mobile than the children of US-born residents who were raised in families with a similar income level.”
― Ran Abramitzky, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success

“Few people are purely selfish; everyone cares about her family and friends. Many are driven by the wish to do good, and they devote considerable effort to behaving in a socially responsible way by being helpful and trying to improve the world. So wouldn’t it be nice to live in a society where everyone put all this effort and energy toward the good of the group and, in turn, received from the group everything he needed?”
― Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

“Social rituals enhance social bonding between commune members and encourage togetherness, which increase members’ perceived value of the inside option and thus alleviate brain drain. Rituals also mitigate adverse selection by demanding a hard-to-fake, costly signal of commitment to the commune.”
― Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

“The ideology of kibbutzim was Socialist Zionism, but socialism and Zionism didn’t always coexist harmoniously. Arab workers were fellows under socialist ideology but often enemies under the Zionist ideology. The attitudes towards new Jewish immigrants who arrived from Middle Eastern countries, discussed in the next chapter, also illustrates the tension between the socialist and Zionist missions of kibbutzim.”
― Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

“Our data reveals that, despite major changes in immigration policy over time, immigrants today move up the economic ladder at the same pace as European immigrants did in the past.”
― Ran Abramitzky, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success