“[Haredim] are to a significant degree making a conscious choice to be poor…If you have seven children on average [and refuse to have them educated in math, science and other secular subjects], you are choosing to be poor [and choosing to have your children and their families be poor].”
Haviv Rettig Gur wrote a detailed explanation of Israli poverty published in today's Times of Israel. Here is excerpt that deals primarily with haredi and Bedouin poverty:
…Fully half of Arab and Haredi households live below the poverty line. As Bank of Israel Governor Karnit Flug pointed out earlier this month to Haredi college students in Jerusalem, among Arabs the figure is 54.4% of households; among Haredim, 46.6%.
Outside these communities, the poverty rate is just 12.5% of households, not far from the average in the developed world.
And it is no accident of fate that has left these communities so poor.
“They are to a significant degree making a conscious choice to be poor,” said Hebrew University economist Avi Simhon, who advised former finance minister Yuval Steinitz and was a member of the Trajtenberg Committee charged with lowering the cost of living in the wake of the 2011 social protests.
That “choice” to be poor, explained Simhon, is rooted in how these communities think about fertility and education. “If you have seven children on average, you are choosing to be poor.”…
Among Haredim, schools stop teaching secular subjects such as mathematics, science and English after age 13, if not earlier, leaving their community members bereft of the skills required to support their large families.
The NII report proves Simhon’s point in stark terms. Those 18.6% of Israeli households who live below the poverty line contain 30% of Israel’s children. That is, the poor have almost twice as many children per household as the non-poor.
Indeed, it is no accident that within Israel’s Muslim community, the poorest group, the Bedouin of the Negev, also have the highest birthrates. Muslim women in northern Israel, who are on average better educated and more prosperous than their southern counterparts, have an average of 2.8 children. But in southern Israel, where the Muslim population is primarily Bedouin — the poorest population in the country — Muslim women have 5.4 children on average, the highest rate in the country.
And so the question of poverty in Israel is not a straightforward economic one. “Israeli poverty is an anomaly,” said Simhon, “because there is this ideological element” that drives many of the choices that sustain poverty.
And it is this harsh truth that politicians steadfastly ignored.…
Thus, for example, there is much good news in the latest poverty report, as Yesh Atid’s welfare minister Cohen took pains to point out. Even as the median income rose, pulling the poverty line itself up 4.4% from 2012 to 2013, some 100,000 Israelis nevertheless saw their household incomes rise above that rising line.
And that improvement was due in no small part to promising trends in the Arab community. As the NII report noted, Arab poverty declined from 54.3% in 2012 to 47.4% in 2013, an improvement driven primarily by a sudden jump of 18% in the number of Arab women who went to work.
This good news is part of a positive long-term trend in the Arab community that is evident also in fertility rates. After the steep cuts in child subsidies passed in 2003 (by then-finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu), fertility rates leveled off and then declined among Israel’s poorest minorities. In 2000, Israel’s Muslim population grew by 3.8%; in 2013, by 2.4%. Net fertility among Muslim women – the number of children an average woman has over her lifetime – declined in those years from 4.7 to 3.4.
These figures suggest that the conditions for growing prosperity are already materializing. Arab women are going to work in larger numbers, while the households they support are shrinking in size.…
Read it all here.