Good News About the Good News: It's Real

If you're not a regular reader of The New York Times, you may have missed this column by Nicholas Kristof. It makes a startling point: The world has gotten dramatically better, and most Americans don't know it. For example, the number of people living in extreme poverty has "fallen by more than half, from 35 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2011." But 95 percent of Americans think the number has either gone up or remained the same.

I began to wonder, though, about that poverty statistic. I knew that China's industrialization had reduced poverty there by a lot. And China, as you may know, has a very large population. How much of the reduction was just China pulling down the average? Is this a real phenomenon in other parts of the world ?

I went to the World Bank data set that Kristof used, and looked at results broken down by region. Here are some (in evenly spaced years):

	Percentage in extreme poverty ($1.25/day or less) E Asia Eur, Ctl Asia Lat Am, Carib. M East, N Afr S Asia Sub-S Afr Total 1984 65.6 2.3 13.4 6.6 57.7 56.3 47.5 1990 57.0 1.5 12.6 5.8 54.1 56.8 43.4 1996 38.3 4.2 10.6 4.8 48.6 59.7 35.9 2002 27.3 2.1 10.2 3.8 44.1 57.2 30.5 2008 13.7 0.5 5.4 2.1 34.1 49.7 21.9 2011 7.9 0.5 4.6 1.7 24.5 46.9 17.0

Yes, this looks pretty real. The decline in East Asia is the most dramatic, a reduction of 88% over the period shown. But poverty in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc) has fallen by more than half, and in Latin America by two-thirds.

And what about within East Asia? Surely that must be just the effect of China. Actually, no. There are huge reductions in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam. There is a smaller but still dramatic reduction in the Philippines.

Does this just mean that there are a lot of people making $1.30/day? No, worldwide the number of people making $2/day or less has fallen by almost half. It's real.

Kristof, unfortunately, says nothing about what brought this about. But if China is representative, globalization, the shifting of production to the Third World, played a big role in raising Third World incomes. This is a rather uncomfortable conclusion for liberals; one has to ask, "Are decades of wage stagnation for the middle class in the developed world too high a price to pay for lifting billions of people out of extreme poverty?"  (If the answer is that it's not too high a price, of course, we can still do better about asking the rich to bear some of the burden.)

Finally, it is disturbing that progress has been so slow in sub-Saharan Africa. Undoubtedly, a big part of the explanation is war: Extreme poverty is at 97 percent in Congo, for example, and 95 percent in Liberia.  And a part of that, in turn, is the resource curse.

Southern Crybabies Start War; Slaughter Ensues

As you may have noticed, there has been a lot of public discussion of the Civil War recently. One point that has been made often is that yes, the cause the South was fighting for really was slavery (and not, say, "states' rights"), and that this is quite evident when we read the states' Declarations of Secession.

So I was looking at South Carolina's Declaration of Secession. It was the first in the nation, and South Carolina is the state that fired the first shot of the Civil War. South Carolina is also the state that's been the focus of the recent news.

Now, recall that this was the bloodiest war in U.S. history, killing about 620,000 people (the equivalent of around 6 million today), ending slavery, and permanently impoverishing the South. You would think, then, that they would not make this decision lightly.

You'd be wrong. What is most striking about South Carolina's reasons for secession is how trivial they are. They complain at great length that Northern states are not returning fugitive slaves, as the Constitution requires:

In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution...In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. 

Annoying, of course, if you're a slaveowner--but annoying enough to start a war? Surely not. And how exactly is secession going to make things better? One would think, in fact, that being a separate nation makes the  problem worse; for instance, you might not be allowed even to enter the neighboring state. (Notice, by the way, that the secession was actually a revolt against states' rights. The association of the Civil War with states' rights, like the public display of the Confederate battle flag, dates to the era of school desegregation.)

So you're seceding over this? Oh no, there's much more:

Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions..they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; 

Ma! Jimmy's calling me sinful!

...they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

Again, annoying; but how is secession supposed to help? (By the way, great oxymoron: "servile insurrection.")

And finally, we get to the nub

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

So the trigger for South Carolina's secession is, in fact, the election of Lincoln.  Mind you, Lincoln hasn't even been inaugurated yet, let alone done anything against slavery. But he is "hostile" to it. The slaveowners feel unloved.

Those are their reasons for starting a war. In fairness, they probably never imagined that because of them, one American in fifty (or, I suppose, one American male in 25) would die.

Police Killings and Racial Bias

The Guardian newspaper, which has been keeping count, announced Wednesday that fatal shootings by police in the U.S. in 2015 had reached 500, and that's only through the end of May. That seems like a shockingly large number.

The article points out that a disproportionate number of African-Americans were killed, using statistics that I've put into this table:

		Police killings		US population
White		49.6%		64.2%
Black		28.2%		13.2%
Hisp.		14.8%		17.1%

Yes, clearly, a disproportionate number of African-Americans are killed. But is that evidence of discrimination by police? After all, there are more arrests of African-Americans, and if there are more arrests, then surely we would expect more gunplay:

		Police killings		Arrests
White		49.6%		68.9%
Black		28.2%		28.3%
Hisp.		14.8%		16.6%

The numbers in the right column add to more than 100, because "Hispanic" is not considered a separate racial category in government statistics. But if we assume that 90-95% of Hispanics are white, and reduce the totals for "white" and "black" in the second column accordingly, then the number of shootings seems roughly in line with the number of arrests.

But that just pushes the question back a step. Why are more African-Americans arrested? Is it because they commit more crimes, or is the statistic itself a sign of police bias? There were complaints in New York City, for example, that blacks were arrested more than whites for marijuana possession, not because they were more likely to smoke marijuana, but because of discriminatory use of "stop-and-frisk" searches.

This, however, doesn't seem to be true for arrests in general. African-Americans make up 30% of all drug arrests, and 26% of all vandalism arrests, but 52% of all murder arrests. It seems unlikely that discriminatory enforcement is more common in murder cases than in drug cases.

So far, the facts don't seem to bear out a claim of police bias. But wait... here's an odd thing.

More than one in every five people killed so far in 2015 – 108, or 21.6% – were unarmed. A significant disparity in the proportion of black and white people killed who were unarmed, which was reported last week by the Guardian, has since narrowed slightly. While 30.5% of white people killed were unarmed, 16.1% of black people killed had no weapon.

Apparently, whites were a lot more likely than blacks to be unarmed when they were killed. Does that mean whites were more likely to be killed when they were unarmed? That would be surprising.

I decided to take look at The Guardian's data set. The data set is actually quite admirable. In addition to demographic information, it has a brief narrative and often a photo for each case. And it will provide counts using various filters, including race of victim and how they were  armed.

The first thing I discovered is that they got the numbers reversed: it's actually 30% of blacks and 16% of whites who were unarmed when they were killed. [Update: The webpage linked above now notes and corrects this error.] Playing just a little more with the data, I find that The Guardian has kind of missed the big story here. Rather than presenting the data as in the first table above, they should have presented this:

		Police killings:
	Armed people		Unarmed people
White	53.5%		36.7%
Black	26.9%		40.4%
Hisp.	15.3%		15.6%

Let's recap. Blacks are disproportionately likely to be arrested. Probably that's mostly because they commit more crimes. While racism undoubtedly is part of the ultimate explanation for that, racism on the part of the police doesn't seem to explain why blacks are arrested more. And if you're armed, your chances of being killed appear about the same for blacks and whites.

But if you're unarmed, the chance of being killed is much greater for blacks than for whites. That does start to look like racism. It needn't mean that the police hate blacks; it could mean they're more likely to perceive blacks as threatening. But of course, that's not much consolation to the familes.

"Hands up, don't shoot" indeed.

Question for Ted Cruz and Rick Perry

"Q: The 2014 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas says, 'Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nation’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.... ' Do you agree with this statement?"

At that, the statement represents a degree of moderation from the 2010 platform, which says, "We believe that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases." It then goes on to talk about the fundamental unchanging truths, etc. I always hoped that someone would ask Ron Paul about this in 2012.

By the way, does anyone know where they're getting this stuff about our nation's founders?

If you start looking the 2014 platform, though, you can find all kinds of statements that a national Presidential candidate would probably prefer not to deal with, at least during the general election:

"We support eliminating bureaucratic prohibitions on corporal discipline and home schooling in foster homes."

"We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax."

"We urge the legislature to end censorship of discussion of religion in our founding documents and encourage discussing those documents, including the Bible as their basis. Students and district personnel have the right to display Christian items on school property."

"We oppose any sex education other than the biology of reproduction and abstinence until marriage."

But why go on? This is the full right-wing-crank stuff. Supporting those positions probably wouldn't damage Cruz or Perry at all in the Republican primaries. But that's interesting in itself, no?

The Myth of the "Ten Commandments"

The Ten Commandments have been in the news again; the Christian right has been saying silly things in their effort to convince people that the Founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation. There is, for example, the Texas school textbook that says the Constitution was influenced by the Ten Commandments. This is like saying that my Honda owner's manual was influenced by "Hamlet"; there is simply no overlap between the two. Put the two documents side by side and see if you can find any resemblance.

But that brought up another question: Why do Christians attach such importance to the Ten Commandments? It seems awfully, shall we say, Old Testament. Out of all the Old Testament, why is this the part that Christians want to carve into two-ton sculptures?

Actually, not everyone believes that Christians need to follow the Ten Commandments; some hold out for faith alone. But among those who do think they must be followed, many sources, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church, cite this passage from Matthew 19:

16And behold, a man came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” 

17And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” 

18He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, 19Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Christians conclude that "Keep the commandments" means "Follow the Ten Commandments." But that creates some puzzles. First, there's the man's question "Which ones?" Seriously? Ten is too many? Second, why does Jesus put in that sixth item, about loving your neighbor? The usual explanation is that this is a sort of summary of the others. But it's certainly not a summary of the missing ones, which include not worshiping idols and observing the Sabbath.

To an observant Jew (I'm not one, but seemingly Jesus was) this is all way off the mark, a misunderstanding. Any observant Jew knows what "Keep the commandments" means. It refers to the hundreds of commandments (mitzvot) in the Five Books of Moses. So the question "Which ones?" makes perfect sense. How important is eating matzoh on Passover? Not mixing wool and linen? Wearing fringes on your garments? Jesus then lists six that he considers important. The sixth is not his own invention; it's another one of the mitzvot, found in Leviticus 19:18.

In fact, Jesus could not have been talking about those ten things written on the two stone tablets, because in Hebrew they are not even called "the Ten Commandments." They're called something like the Ten Words or the Ten Utterances (hence the Greek Decalogue). Jews consider the first one to be "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt," so only the remaining nine are actual commandments.

The Ten Utterances are considered to be God's covenant with Israel. Remember "Raiders of the Lost Ark"? The box in which the Israelites carried the two stone tablets was called the Ark of the Covenant, not the Ark of the Commandments. And Jews believe that only some of the commandments in the covenant are binding on non-Jews. Notice that in the First Utterance, God says "...who brought you out of the land of Egypt." Brought whom out of the land of Egypt?

Things I don't understand, o my Christian brethren:

(1) Christians are quite emphatic that Jesus gave them a New Covenant to supplant the Old Covenant that Jews had with God. So why would you adopt the Old Covenant in its entirety?

(2) A man asks the central figure in Christianity--the Son of God--what laws to follow. The man is given a list of six laws. Christians do not respond by writing them on the walls of their churches. Instead, they put aside the sixth one, and add five others that Jesus doesn't mention. Why?

Well, for whatever reason, that's what the Christians did. And so the Ten Commandments became "the very cornerstone of Western Civilization, and the basis of our legal system here in America." Surely no one can dispute that.

I do dispute it. Take a look at our nation's prisons.  You will find no one convicted of Sabbath-breaking, adultery, making graven images, coveting, or talking back to their parents. The Puritans, certainly, might have locked up such people, but that's never been part of "our legal system here in America." (Yes, I know, Massachusetts used to have blue laws.) The only Commandments whose violation is a felony in America are those against murder, theft, and perjury, and probably those were felonies in Zhou Dynasty China and Egypt under the Pharaohs. Conversely, we managed to come up with laws against rape, sale of narcotics, child molestation, prostitution, and many other things not mentioned in Ten Commandments.

So there you have it. If I were a believing Christian, I'd just try to follow the Six Commandments. And I'd object vociferously if anyone tried to tell me the Ten Commandments are the basis for American law.

"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev"

The trial is now in the penalty phase, and I can't think of anything to say. So I'll talk about linguistics and orthography.

Looking at his name, you can tell he's from a country in the former Soviet Union. First, it's obviously a non-Russian name, but it has the ov/ev ending common in Russian names. The president of Kazakhstan is Nursultan Nazarbayev, and the president of Uzbekistan is Islam Karimov. I don't know whether the intent was to seem Russian or just to make it fit into Russian grammar better.

The real giveaway, though, is the first name. Like many languages, Russian does not have the English "j" sound as in joy, jam, Juliet. But it does have a "zh" sound, like the "s" in "pleasure" or the "z" in "azure." So it transliterates the "j" sound as "dzh." Try saying it. (Incidentally, "dzh" doesn't look quite as awkward in Cyrillic, where it's only two letters:  дж)

In French, as you may know, the letter j is pronounced "zh". They transliterate our "j" sound as "dj". Thus we get Django Reinhardt, who was born in Belgium. Quentin Tarantino notwithstanding, I'm certain that there never was an American slave named Django; Americans would have spelled it Jango.

Djibouti is only one of the many places where French orthography has left its scar on the map of Africa. My favorite is Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, which under the British Empire would've been called Wagadugu. Other than that, I don't know whether Africans were worse off under the French or the British, though apparently the Belgians were the worst.

Another sound French lacks is the English "ch" sound in "cheese," which it writes "tch" ("ch" is pronounced "sh"). Chad managed to escape calling itself Tchad, which is what it's called in French. But poor Tchaikovsky somehow ended up that way in English, instead of Chaikovsky

Oh, and the "kh" in "Dzhokhar" is of course the German "ch" sound. For Americans, he pronounced that as an "h".

On second thought, I do have one comment about the trial. There may be good arguments for putting Tsarnaev to death. That he gave the finger to the camera in his cell is not one of them. The prosecution is being shamelessly manipulative, and not very truthful. This is a serious business. Take it seriously, Department of Justice.

On the Question "When Does Human Life Begin?"

When does an oak tree's life begin? I am not asking this frivolously.

I would say: An oak tree begins life as an acorn.

But an acorn is not the same thing as an oak tree. Then when does an oak tree become an oak tree? That's a much harder question.

The question is not, When does human life begin? That's easy: at conception. The question is, When does a human become a human? That's a much harder question.

The Israeli Elections II: Bibi's Last Rabbit?

Benjamin Netanyahu used to be known in Israel as "The Magician," and there did seem to be something paranormal about how he saved himself in last month's election. Trailing by four seats in the polls four days before the election, his Likud party ended up on top by six seats, for a big increase over the previous election. Here's that chart from Wikipedia again:

Party		Votes	%	Seats	+/–
	Likud	985,408	23.40	30	+12
	Zionist Union	786,313	18.67	24	+3
	Joint List	446,583	10.61	13	+2
	Yesh Atid	371,602	8.82	11	–8
	Kulanu	315,360	7.49	10	New
	The Jewish Home	283,910	6.74	8	–4
	Shas	241,613	5.74	7	–4
	Yisrael Beiteinu	214,906	5.10	6	–7
	United Torah Judaism	210,143	4.99	6	–1
	Meretz	165,529	3.93	5	–1

So how did he do it? Did Israel suddenly shift to the right?

Not noticeably. Here's the above chart, as recalculated by me:

	Votes	%	Seats	+/–
Right	1,484,224	35.2%	44	+1
Center	686,962	16.3%	21	+2
Left	1,150,937	27.3%	29	+2
Ultra-Orth.	451,756	10.7%	13	-5
Arab	446,583	10.6%	13	+2

Looked at this way, there's been almost no change. What Netanyahu apparently managed to do was scare people enough that they deserted the other right-wing parties and voted for Likud. That made Likud the biggest party, giving them the first chance to put together a coalition. But overall, there wasn't much change in the proportion voting for each group.*

If not for the shift to Likud from other right-wing parties, the Zionist Union would have won; then it can easily put together a center-left coalition that, with passive support from the Arabs, could get a majority of more than 60.**  But Bibi pulls out the win!

The question now is what the cost will be to Netanyahu in the long run. Certainly his Election Day appearance on Facebook, warning that Arabs were coming out to vote "in droves," and were being bused in by leftist organizations, did not make a favorable impression among Americans, who quickly translate it to: "Come out and vote, because liberals are driving busloads of blacks to the polls!"  Polarized though American politics has become, that hasn't been a conceivable statement by an American  politician in at least forty years. (Netanyahu later apologized, but I don't think anyone was mollified.)

More problematic still was Netanyahu's statement that there wouldn't be a Palestinian state on his watch, followed after the election with a "Ha, ha, just kidding!" This was about the last straw for the Obama administration, which seems to feel liberated now that it is no longer obliged to believe that Netanyahu is sincere. I think it's possible that Bibi's bag of tricks is now empty.


* In fact, probably less than appears-- one of the ultra-Orthodox parties didn't make the new higher cutoff and so is not counted above, resulting in a small gain in seats for everyone else.

** You can't get over 60 with the ultra-Orthodox parties instead, because then you lose one of the centrist parties.

How To Solve the California Water Crisis

The California water crisis is all over the national news, thanks to Gov. Jerry Brown's imposition last week of mandatory cuts in urban water use averaging 25%. This has resulted in a lot of finger-pointing, as people blame their pet peeves.

For example, we're told that, in the middle of a drought, fracking (the controversial new technique for oil and gas extraction) used up 70 million gallons of water last year. But when you do the math, this turns out to be about five millionths of California's water use. Then there's the attack on Nestlé for bottling and selling California's water. You can say, with some justification, that bottled water is a waste of money, plastic, and energy. What you can't say is that it's a waste of water-- I mean, people are drinking it. (OK, Nestlé may be shipping some of it out of state.)

To my surprise, though, a lot of the finger-pointing this time has focused on the real issue: Brown's restrictions apply only to urban water use, but that represents just 20% of California's water use (around 10% to households and 10% to business and industry). The other 80% goes to agriculture. So a 25% reduction in urban use, a pretty drastic reduction, saves about the same amount of water as a 6% reduction in agricultural use.

And the fingers are pointing pretty hard. Ten percent of California's water goes to almond farming-- in other words, as much as goes to all household use. A hundred billion gallons a year goes to alfalfa exported to China.

Here we come to the fork in the road that divides most people from people with some background in economics. The former say, "That's outrageous! Maybe we should ban almond growing in California. Maybe we should make people aware of how much water is going into those almonds they're eating." The latter say, "Boy, the farmers really aren't paying enough for water."

Enter the famous "miracle of the market." We don't need to decide whether growing almonds is worth it, where they should be grown instead,  and what crops, if any, should replace them. We raise the price farmers pay for water, charging them a price comparable to the wholesale price of water in Los Angeles, and let farmers figure that out. Maybe they should continue growing almonds but not alfalfa, or vice versa. Maybe they should raise vegetables. Maybe they should install more efficient irrigation systems. Maybe they should pack it in and move to Palm Springs. In any case, consumers don't have to decide whether or not to feel guilty about eating almonds.

Unfortunately, this particular miracle of the market leaves quite a bit of damage in its wake. Many farmers probably go out of business, and the ones who don't are a lot poorer than they used to be. A lot of people may not like that result, especially the farmers themselves. What then?

Suppose we keep the price of water to farmers where it is, but allow them to wholesale some of their water (or water rights) to the cities. What happens? Clearly the farmers are no worse off; they can always decide not to sell.  But now, for every gallon (or million gallons, or acre-foot) wasted through inefficient irrigation or overly thirsty crops, the farmer loses the opportunity to make serious money. Now farmers have the same incentive to conserve as if they had to pay a higher price, without being impoverished. Maybe they grow almonds, maybe alfalfa, maybe something else, maybe it's off to Palm Springs (which they'll now be able to afford). End of problem.

Of course it's a little trickier than that. To allow farmers to sell their water means untangling the complexities of Western water law, under which, for example, you can lose your right to water if you don't use it, and some farmers have rights that are senior to other farmers'. But most of this is state law, so California could fix it if the pressure gets intense enough. Also, you need a good regulatory system for groundwater, which California is just putting into place; otherwise farmers just pump the aquifers dry and sell the water. But basically, end of problem.

Wait! say the Greens. What about all those huge lawns in Los Angeles? Actually, per capita use in LA has been going down, as people install more low-flow bathroom fixtures, xeriscape their yards, and fill their pools with Pinot Grigio (well, in Beverly Hills). But maybe even with the farmers using less, we still need to cut back on urban use.

So we could go the Jerry Brown route and impose a mandatory cut, making everyone use only 75% as much as they do now. Or... consider this: Suppose we make the first 50% free. Then we triple the price of every gallon thereafter. Now people who use 75% pay the same as they would have with the mandatory cut. But those who feel they've just gotta have more water for their pet beluga whale can do it, at a steep price. And perhaps more important, people have an incentive to conserve below 75% if they can, because it saves them a lot of money. Those people come out ahead financially. In particular, poor people probably come out ahead.

It's remarkable how many problems can be fixed by getting the prices right. Like global warming. But let's not get into that.

The Israeli Elections I: What's With the Arabs?

Israeli Arabs were pretty excited about this election, but not because there were unusual issues. A change in the election law had raised the vote threshold for representation in the Knesset (Israel's parliament), threatening the elimination of the three small Arab parties. The result was that they overcame their differences and ran on the same ticket, which they called the Joint List. Arab voters were excited because for the first time it it seemed possible that there would be a large Arab party in the Knesset.

And so it turned out. Here's a chart from Wikipedia:

Party		Votes	%	Seats	+/–
	Likud	985,408	23.40	30	+12
	Zionist Union	786,313	18.67	24	+3
	Joint List	446,583	10.61	13	+2
	Yesh Atid	371,602	8.82	11	–8
	Kulanu	315,360	7.49	10	New
	The Jewish Home	283,910	6.74	8	–4
	Shas	241,613	5.74	7	–4
	Yisrael Beiteinu	214,906	5.10	6	–7
	United Torah Judaism	210,143	4.99	6	–1
	Meretz	165,529	3.93	5	–1

The Joint List ended up the third-largest group, with 13 seats out of 120. In testimony to the enthusiasm of the Arab electorate, they got two more seats than all three combined had in the last election.

So with this new big party, how much power will the Arabs have in the new Knesset? 

Well, basically... none.

You see, the right-wing Likud won the election, and now should be able to put together a coalition of the right and the ultra-Orthodox (everyone from Kulanu through United Torah Judaism in the chart above). As long as the coalition holds together, it doesn't need the Arabs. And the coalition includes some pretty anti-Arab people. As for a Palestinian state, forget it. 

Now let's imagine a different scenario: suppose all the Arabs vote for the Zionist Union. The ZU ends up with, conservatively, 35 seats. It has no trouble putting together 61 seats for a coalition. Arabs represent about a third of the votes for the largest party in the Knesset. Under which condition do Arabs have more power, that or the actual one?

So why didn't they do that? What's with them? First, in Israel there doesn't seem to be much concept of power within an existing party. Rather, if you have a political agenda, you form your own party. As a former colleague of mine at Haifa put it, Israel doesn't have interest groups, it has interest parties. If U.S. politics were like Israeli politics, we would have a party for Hispanics, a party for evangelical Christians, and so on.

Second, and probably more important, Arab leaders seem to prefer principles to power. The Arabs are against the idea of a Jewish state; they want "a state of all its citizens." The Arabs (or the Arab elite) are so attached this principle that they could never vote for any Zionist party, let alone one with "Zionist" in the name.

Indeed, the quest for purity of principle goes further than this: the Joint List said before the election that if the left won, they would support it, but wouldn't accept a cabinet position. One might think that if your goal is to improve the conditions of Israeli Arabs, it would be helpful to have a member of your party as, say, Minister of Housing and Construction. Or at least to have a vote at cabinet meetings. But no; apparently that would be too craven a compromise with the system.

Arabs are certainly entitled to try for a non-Jewish state if they want. They won't get it, because the overwhelming majority of Jews are against it, but they can try. The question is, does refusing to taint themselves with governing make it more likely that they will succeed? Not that I can see. It just makes them powerless in the meantime.