Flourish: (from Old French, floriss, “to blossom”) – to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment.
The Report: Columnist, you can’t be serious. You’ve had too much kosher wine.
Israelis are flourishing? Coming up on two years of the endless Gaza War? A government doing the opposite of what a large majority of the people favor? Hostages starving in darkness? Israel is now a pariah state in world opinion? Massive demonstrations, blocking roads? A budget deficit approaching six percent of GDP? Money pouring into West Bank construction rather than rebuilding Soroka Hospital and the Weizmann Institute? Cabinet efforts to exempt one-seventh of the population from army service? Seriously?
Flourishing? A particularly favorable environment? Israel? Do we live in the same country?
Columnist: I debated long and hard about the heading. It sounds detached from reality. Hear me out, dear readers. Let me make the case. It is not as unrealistic as it sounds.
How are Israelis flourishing?
Israelis are indeed flourishing. A Harvard study published on April 30 in the prestigious journal Nature – Mental Health shows that Israel ranks second among 22 leading nations in “global flourishing.”
The Global Flourishing Study (GFS) was led by Tyler J. VanderWeele of Harvard University and Byron Johnson of Baylor University. The researchers interviewed some 200,000 people across 22 countries beginning in 2022. Their findings show that a few balanced countries do well across material, social, and spiritual measures, notably Israel and Poland.
The Global Flourishing Index measures well-being in three key dimensions: material, spiritual, and social. Israel ranks 13th in the world in GDP per capita. It is a country with deep spiritual, Jewish roots. And socially, Israeli families are very strong and cohesive.
As columnist David Brooks reported in The New York Times on August 7, many countries score well materially, e.g. the United States – but the people who live in them are less likely to have a sense of clear purpose and meaning. Other countries don’t do as well economically but do very well socially and spiritually, such as Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines.
“In 2007,” Brooks notes, “67 percent of Americans and Canadians said they were thriving. Now it’s down to 49 percent.” Why? Material well-being is offset by erosion of spiritual and social dimensions.
Brooks writes: “I’d say that the nations that are doing well in that Gallup thriving survey are those that are experiencing rising living standards while preserving their traditional social arrangements and value systems. The nations like America that are seeing declining well-being are fine economically, but their social and spiritual environments are deteriorating.”
Indonesia and Mexico rank highest, disregarding financial indicators; Israel is fourth. This, even though Mexico’s per capita GDP is one-sixth that of the US. Indonesia and Israel rank #1 and #2, with financial indicators.
In many countries, young people in particular are despondent about their future. The US is indeed one of the world’s highest-income nations, but young people feel they will never be able to afford to buy a high-priced house and build a family in it.
The proof of the Israeli flourishing pudding is that Israelis are having babies. In 2024, in the wake of the October 7, 2023, disaster, 181,000 babies were born in Israel – a significant increase from previous years, when a decline in births was observed.
Israel is the only nation that has an ongoing baby boom during a bitter war rather than afterward, when peace is restored. And Israel’s total birth rate is highest in the West – at a time, for instance, when Russia, China, Japan, and other nations have shrinking populations and a major decline in marriage and births. South Korea, for example, has a contracting military because its young people decline to marry and have kids.
The Harvard study shows that many wealthy nations are not flourishing. But why? VanderWeele thinks it’s a question of priorities. “I tend to think you end up getting what you value most,” he told David Brooks. “When a society is oriented toward economic gain, you will be moderately successful, but not if it’s done at the expense of meaning and community.”
This perhaps is the ultimate failure of capitalism. Capitalism is the premier system for creating wealth. True. But it comes at the expense of massive inequality – billionaires versus paupers – leading to social divisiveness, polarized populist politics, and the worship of wealth rather than our creator.
US billionaires now compete not to benefit society, to “be a blessing” as the Bible counsels, and to tackle social needs but to see who has the most costly, lavish yacht. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ yacht, built in the Netherlands for $400 million, was so huge that it could not initially be taken to sea because it couldn’t sail under an Amsterdam bridge (they dismantled the mast). Such yachts need a supply vessel tagging along, for fuel, food, and drink. Imagine what could be done for humanity with those yacht resources.
The global flourishing ranking echoes a longstanding finding. In general, people are far more optimistic about their own well-being and thriving than they are about that of the country in which they live. But at least for the US, it reveals a disturbing new trend: Americans are becoming pessimistic about their own well-being and despondent about their future and that of their families, as well as about the state of their nation.
US marriage rates have been in decline for years, and statisticians report it is now at a near record low. Why marry and have kids if the future you see is bleak and the ability to settle down and own your own home is unattainable? Efforts to boost marriage rates and birth rates with money incentives have proven futile everywhere because the underlying problem is not economic or financial.
I believe the Global Flourishing Study is a vast improvement on global ranking of happiness. The GFS measures well-being holistically, broadly, in the dimensions of health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships, financial security, and spiritual well-being. Flourishing is defined in the study as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives.”
Indeed, Israelis live in a very bad neighborhood. “Bad” hardly describes it. But this has been true since 1948 and long before. Building a Jewish state and defending it is, for me, an Anglo-Saxon new immigrant, a goal with great personal meaning as it is for most Israelis. Zionism, working to shape a Jewish state as one among 200 nations, is a worthy life mission, slandered by those who deny that right for world Jewry, in the face of 57 Muslim nations and two billion Muslims.
The fatal flaw of capitalism as a wealth machine is crystal clear. Billionaires use their wealth to buy political influence and perpetuate their wealth, corrupting democracy. US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis observed a century ago: “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can’t have both.”
He was prescient. Note the incredible warp speed U-turn by Silicon Valley billionaires, dumping the Democrats and cozying up to Republican Donald Trump.
A 2021 White House study showed that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the US paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2%. That is far less than what working people pay on average. And it’s getting worse.
But a word of caution. The Global Flourishing Study raises three troubling questions: “Are we sufficiently investing in the future, given the notable flourishing age-gradient, with the youngest groups often faring the most poorly? Can we carry out economic development in ways that do not compromise meaning and purpose and relationships and character, given that many economically developed nations are not faring as well on these measures? Have we sometimes been neglecting, or even suppressing, powerful spiritual pathways to flourishing?”
There is a Yiddish saying Der liebe is zis. Besser mit broit. “Love is sweet. It’s better when you have bread to eat.”
Perhaps it could be inverted. Having lots of bread to eat is sweet. But it’s a lot better when you have love, meaning, faith, purpose, hope, and vision. Tangible wealth is worthless without those crucial intangibles.
The wealth machines of the West have disappointed. The question is, can they be repaired? And can Israel, which against the odds is still flourishing, avoid the youth despondency that afflicts the US and other wealthy countries? ■
The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion. He blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.