The Economics of the Intifada

The number of Palestinians who worked daily in Israel before the intifada was more than 150,000; the figure now is fewer than 35,000.

Of the 2.2 million Palestinians on the West Bank, 50 percent now live below the poverty line, compared with 22 percent in 2001; the figure is now 68 percent in teeming Gaza, with its 1.3 million people.

The percentage of Palestinians with savings declined from 70 percent to 13 percent.

Before the second intifada, some $500 million a year was provided in aid; the average annual figure for the last four years is more than $1 billion, about $310 a person, the highest per capita rate in the world.

Some 500,000 of the 3.5 million Palestinians are in dire economic straits, said David Shearer, the head of the United Nations agency’s office here. Some 40 percent now feel insecure about feeding their families; 29 percent feel severely insecure, and half of them are heavily dependent on foreign aid. Some 30 percent are watching their savings dwindle. “They are the new poor, and they are slipping down,” Mr. Shearer said.

Here is the full story.

Yet many Palestinians support the intifada, and obviously some are willing to die for it. I conclude that economists need a better theory of human irrationality. Analogies from expressive voting theory suggest that (many) Palestinians support the intifada because their voices are not decisive. The support is seen as a kind of “cheap talk,” leading to a collective insanity which perhaps no single person intended. But do individual Palestinians who support the intifada really mind that so many other people go along with them? Doubtful, the contrary is sooner true, namely that people prefer that their peers follow their position.

In my (admittedly unorthodox) view the degree of decisiveness is not the key to determining the degree of human rationality. I would sooner believe that the amount of pride at stake is what turns on the irrational part of our brains, whether we are decisive or not. Remember, Stalin was convinced that Hitler was not going to invade anytime soon.