Russ Roberts: prediction

Transcript context

…I have a very easy question for you now. If there’s a conflict between the ethnic religious identity of Israel and the democratic nature of Israel, what philosophic standard do you apply to resolve that conflict? Easiest question of the hour, right? You just flip a coin, I think. I talk about that in the book also, by the way. There’s a beautiful poem by Piet Hein where he says — and I’ve heard other people say — “You flip the coin so that you’ll know what to root for. That tells you what you really want.” Piet Hein was a great scientist, thinker, mathematician. Here’s this guy saying, “Flip the coin so you can find out what your gut is really hoping for, and use that to make the decision.” That’s part of what I’m interested in for this book. I think there’s a really interesting tension that you’re identifying, especially for a religious person. I don’t want to live in theocracy, Jewish or otherwise. I’m a big believer in competition to make the world a better place, under some constraints of course. Israel has — was it 30 years ago? Thirty years ago, everybody knew that Israel was going to struggle to stay a Jewish state because birth rates were low among the Jewish population. They were high among the Arab Israeli population. Soon, Israel will be in this weird predicament of being a Jewish state where the Jews are a minority. People did not foresee the fall of the Soviet Union and the influx of millions of Russian Jews into Israel. Israel’s really avoided the existential threats that would require a very, very nondemocratic response. It’s not a democratic place like America. Any Jew can come live here, if they can prove that they’re Jewish — but much harder if you’re not. I’m a big fan of open borders, but I do want there to be a Jewish state. There’s an inconsistency there, for me, that’s somewhat troubling. But I’m happy to maintain that, the ethnic religious character that you referred to as a Jewish state. I have to say that it used to be, when I was growing up, “That’s pleasant. It’s nice to have a Jewish state.” In the last 10 years, the last 5 years, I’ve actually thought, there really has to be a Jewish state. We actually were living in a world where anti-Semitism was unimaginable 20 years ago. It’s now increasingly common or not surprising. I think it’s scary. The so-called Jewish question: What’s the Jews’ role in the world when they’re a citizen of another country? It’s back, and hard to imagine. I’m shocked by it. Are you surprised by that? I know it doesn’t touch you the way it touches me or my children, but are you surprised that anti-Semitism is actually — people get killed for being Jews in the United States? Weird. Didn’t think it could happen. Doesn’t happen very often. I’m not paranoid about it, but it’s surprising it happens at all. I would just say I have worked very hard over the last 20 years to try to root out recency bias in my expectations. Fewer bad things surprise me than used to, is how I would put it, because if you look at broader history, it’s a pretty common event, as are many other bad things. We suffer from recency bias. We think what we’ve seen over the 20 or 30 years where the centrality of our own growing up happened is somehow special, but it’s not.…

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