Lessons from the Kibbutz on the Equality-Incentives Trade-off
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Lessons from the Kibbutz on the Equality-Incentives Trade-off
| Full title | Lessons from the Kibbutz on the Equality–Incentives Trade-off (Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 25 no. 1, Winter 2011, pp. 185–208) |
|---|---|
| Author | Ran Abramitzky |
| Published | 2011 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Ran Abramitzky’s journal article treats the Israeli kibbutzim as a long-running natural experiment in voluntary income equality — how they held off shirking and adverse selection for decades, and why the most equal ones had the most trouble keeping their most productive members. |
Where I heard about it
- Brendan McCord — on his Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List (March 2026), in the Institutions, Property Rights, and the Law section between Alchian and Demsetz on property rights and Cooter’s Solomon’s Knot — the section tests institutional claims against cases, and the kibbutz is the cleanest available case for what equality costs in incentives. The full list is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.
About this edition
A journal article, not a book: Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 25 no. 1, Winter 2011, pp. 185–208. Abramitzky asks how communities that shared income equally, held no private property and ran communal dining and children’s housing survived for decades in a market economy. His answers centre on screening and high exit costs to limit adverse selection, dense mutual observation to limit shirking, and shared ideology to sustain the rest. He traces the 1990s shift to differential pay to the erosion of those mechanisms as the outside wage premium for skill rose.
Connections
- Incentives — the half of the trade-off the paper measures.
- Collectivism — the arrangement being studied, in its voluntary form.
- Commons — the shared-resource problem the kibbutz mechanisms were solving.
- Equality and Efficiency (Okun) — Okun’s statement of the same trade-off, in McCord’s Capitalism, Morality, and Culture section.
- The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.