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The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World QUOTES

The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― , The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

2 " 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. "

― , The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

3 " 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. "

― , The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

4 " 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). "

― , The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

5 " 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. "

― , The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

6 " 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? "

― , The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World