Why So Happy?

Even in the best of times, Israel’s consistently high ranking in this annual study is puzzling, to say the least. No other country faces sworn enemies bent on its destruction on seven fronts, all of them on strings pulled by a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, which has repeatedly expressed its goal to excise Israel from existence.

And yet when it comes to looking toward the future, Israel is arguably the most optimistic country in the world. Dan Senor and Saul Singer, in their new book The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Naton in a Turbulent World, cite a separate worldwide survey asking adults whether they expected their children to be better off or worse off than them. The majority in almost every country answered “worse off,” and the number of pessimists skyrocketed between 2019 and 2022. Israelis, however, were the least pessimistic, and the already low number of pessimists declined during the period when it was rising everywhere else in the world.

But there is even more direct evidence of that optimism. Israel’s birthrate is nearly twice that of the other 39 OECD countries, and at 3.1 children per woman, Israel is the only country in the group with above-replacement levels of fertility. Only Israel does not face depopulation and an ever-aging population placing an unsupportable burden on the remaining young workers.

As I have noted numerous times, if one were to plot a graph of the industrialized nations with fertility rates on the vertical axis and suicide rates on the horizontal axis, Israel exists in the upper left quadrant all by itself — “a nation that shall dwell alone.”