Start-up Nation

ranked twenty-first).

Israel, a nation of immigrants, has continually been dependent on successive waves of immigration to grow its economy. It is in large part thanks to these immigrants that Israel currently has more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country and produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation—109 per 10,000 people.¹⁸ Jewish newcomers and their non-Jewish family members are readily granted residency, citizenship, and benefits. Israel is universally regarded as highly entrepreneurial and—like the IDF—dismissive of the strictures of hierarchy.

In the Persian Gulf, however, governments will allow residency visas for only up to three years, nothing longer—even for fellow Muslims and Arabs. There is no path to citizenship in these countries. So globally sought-after researchers have been unwilling to relocate their families in meaningful numbers and invest their careers in an institution whose host country stifles free speech, academic freedom, and government transparency and puts a time limit on residency. While five- or ten-year residency visas have been considered in several gulf Arab countries, no government has ever ultimately allowed for them.

These residency restrictions are also symptomatic of a larger obstacle to attracting academics: the few research professionals who have shown up quickly became aware of the government’s desire to keep them on the outskirts. The laws emanate from the pressure on governments to be responsive to Arab nationalism broadly, and sovereign nationalism specifically. For example, an Emirati woman who marries an expat must give up her citizenship, and their children will not be issued a UAE passport or any of the government’s welfare benefits.

One of the major challenges to a high-growth entrepreneurial culture elsewhere in the Arab world—beyond just the gulf—is that the teaching models in primary and secondary schools and even the universities are focused on rote memorization. According to Hassan Bealaway, an adviser to the Egyptian Ministry of Education, learning is more about systems, standards, and deference rather than experimentation. It is much more the Columbia model than the Apollo.

This emphasis on standardization has shaped an education policy that defines success by measuring inputs rather than outcomes. For example, according to a study produced by the Persian Gulf offices of McKinsey & Company, Arab governments have been consumed with the number of teachers and investments in infrastructure—buildings and now computers—in hopes of improving their students’ performance. But the results of the recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study ranked Saudi students forty-third out of forty-five (Saudi Arabia was even behind Botswana, which was forty-second).¹⁹

While the average student-teacher ratio in the GCC is 12 to 1—one of the world’s lowest, comparing favorably with an average of 17 to 1 in OECD countries—it has had no real positive effect. Unfortunately, international evidence suggests that low student-teacher ratios correlate poorly with strong student performance and are far less important than the quality of the teachers. But the education ministries in most Arab countries do not measure teacher performance. Inputs are easier to measure, through a methodology of standardization.

Focusing on the number of teachers has particularly harmful implications for boys in the Arab world. Many government schools are segregated by gender: boys are taught by men, girls by women. Since teaching positions have traditionally been less appealing to men, there is a shortage of teachers for boys. As a result of the smaller talent pool, boys’ schools often employ lower-quality teachers. In fact, the GCC gender gap in student performance is among the most extreme in the world.

Finally, a perhaps even larger factor in the limit on high-growth entrepreneurial economies is the role of women. Harvard University’s David Landes, author of the seminal book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, argues that the best barometer of an economy’s growth potential lies in the legal rights and status of its women. “To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent . . . [and] to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men,” he writes. Landes believes that nothing is more dilutive to drive and ambition than a sense of entitlement. Every society has elites, and a number of them were born into their upper-echelon status. But there is no more widely dispersed sense of entitlement than ingraining in the minds of half the population that they are superior, which, he argues, reduces their “need to learn and do.” This kind of distortion makes an economy inherently uncompetitive, and it is the result of the subordinated economic status of women in the Arab world.²⁰

The economy of Israel and many of those in the Arab world are living laboratories for the economic theory of clusters and, more broadly, what it takes for nations to generate—or stifle—innovation. The contrast between the two models demonstrates that a simplistic view of clusters—one that maintains that a collection of institutions can be mechanically assembled and out will pop a Silicon Valley—is flawed. Moreover, it seems that a stake in the country, Tuchman’s “motive,” provides an essential glue that helps encourage entrepreneurs to build and take risks.

CHAPTER 14

Threats to the Economic Miracle

We’re using fewer and fewer of the cylinders to move this machine forward.