August 2010 Assaf Razin: Biographical Notes

I am the oldest of three children of my father, Mordechai (“ Mussia”) Berezin, and my mother Dora Leibovitch. I spent the first 24 years of my life in my birthplace, Kibbutz Shamir; a rural place in the northeastern part of Israel. These personal biographical notes cover my background from the young age at the kibbutz, through my graduate education at the University of Chicago, the first academic jobs, and the major turning points in my adult life. My professional life as an economist is covered in detail in my vitae (see http:// www. tau. ac. il/~ razin). Against expectations that economists' CVs will slip into mathematical formulae by page five, this 50 page economist's bio does not slip into mathematical expressions at all.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

I was born and bred in Kibbutz Shamir, in what was then the British Mandate Palestine. It was established in 1939 by a small group of mainly Romanian Jewish immigrants to Palestine, in a temporary place near Kfar Atta in the Haifa region. In 1944 it was relocated to a permanent place on the slopes of the Golan Heights, which tower 3,000 feet above the Upper Galilee. Indeed, before the border shifted east as a result of the six- day war in 1967, Kibbutz Shamir was at the most eastern border settlement in Israel. The Kibbutz system, though it spans a wide geographical area along the borders of Israel, has always been a tiny minority of Israel’s population. A relatively rare phenomenon can be observed from the kibbutz – a ‘sunrise in the west’. The kibbutz is nested in the steeply- rising western slopes of the Golan. When the sun rises, its first rays at daybreak illuminate the peaks of the Ramim mountain range across the valley to the west of Shamir. As the sun climbs progressively higher the more of Ramim is bathed in sunshine which can then be observed progressing from west to east, down the slopes of Ramim, across the valley and up the slopes of the Golan before reaching the kibbutz.

The kibbutz (Hebrew word for "communal settlement") is a unique rural community; the fulfillment of Karl Marx’s idea "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". The first kibbutzim (plural of 'kibbutz') were founded some 40 years before the establishment of the State of Israel (1948). Their founders were young Jewish pioneers, mainly from Eastern Europe, who came not only to reclaim the soil of their ancient homeland (as is Zionism), but also to forge a new way of life. Today there are some 270 kibbutzim, with memberships ranging from 40 to more than 1, 000, scattered throughout the country, mostly in the periphery. The proportion of the kibbutz population within the Israeli society declined from 6.5% in the 1948 census to 3. 3% in 1972. At the end of the year 2002 the kibbutz Population numbered 115,600, living in 268 kibbutzim, and it constituted 2.1% of the total Jewish population in the country.

The kibbutz movement is almost a century old. In a society in which there is no effective central government, as was essentially the situation of the Jewish community in Palestine until Israel gained statehood in 1948 (and even afterwards, in frontier regions exposed to Arab terrorism), smaller groups will form for self- defense and the provision of other public goods, such as social insurance. Collective ownership and wage equality are ways of protecting each member of the collective from economic and other hardships; "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"-- the communist slogan implemented successfully in the classic kibbutz- - is then a method of social insurance. As Judge Richard Posner notes, “In trying to weaken the bond between parents and children, the founders of the kibbutz movement, echoing Plato, who in his sketch of an ideal communist state in the Republic had advocated the communal rearing of children, were acknowledging that parents' instinctual desire to advance their children was inconsistent with communal equality.” The proportion of