View Online and Translate “Capability creates possibilities; shared futures realize them.” Origins My paternal grandparents arrived from Poland in 1925 and joined Kibbutz Ayelet HaShahar, the third kibbutz established in the Land of Israel, just a decade after its founding. At the time, the British Empire ruled the land, agriculture was in its infancy, modern technology was almost nonexistent, security was fragile, and diseases such as malaria claimed many lives. The pionee

View Online and Translate “Every new form of cooperation expands what becomes possible.” Organization The fruit harvest was one of the highlights of my childhood on the kibbutz. From June through October, the orchards came alive. At the peak of the season, nearly one hundred people harvested just under 1,000 tons of apples, peaches, plums, grapes, cherries, and other fruits. Kibbutz members, volunteers from around the world, high school groups, and seasonal workers filled t

View Online and Translate “Success answers questions. Discovery changes the questions we ask.” Intervention Some of the most intriguing scientific questions arise not when an intervention fails but when it succeeds. One such question began for me in 2015, when Biofeed's proposal to address a severe fruit fly infestation using non-spray technology was selected in the Grand Challenges Israel competition, an initiative established by the Israeli government to support innovat

Activity is visible. Prosperity is not.” In the spring of 1989, a few months after completing four years of military service and returning to the kibbutz orchards where I had grown up and loved, an extension services advisor from Israel's Ministry of Agriculture came for a field visit. I had recently taken responsibility for crop protection in the orchards and was eager to do the job well. Yet despite following the recommended protocols, pest outbreaks persisted. The orchar

View this in your browser “What changes is not what we see, but how we understand what we see.” Assumptions To understand what the series “The Structure of Prosperity” reveals, it is useful to revisit the assumptions through which most of us first understand the world. Systems are expected to be stable, aligned, and internally coherent, and when opposing forces arise, they are interpreted as signs that something has gone wrong. Tension is treated as a deviation from how

View this in your browser "Complexity emerges not by eliminating differences, but by organizing them into increasingly productive forms of interdependence." Misinterpretation Imagine a world in which everything is perfectly aligned, with no opposing forces, no disagreement, and no tension to sustain. Such a world might appear orderly and coherent, yet it is difficult to see how it could generate the differences, relationships, and adaptations from which structure, life

View this in your browser “Enabling structures expand what societies can sustain together.” Civilizations A child born today inherits social structures that civilizations built over thousands of years. Long before learning to read, that child enters a world organized by cities, universities, governments, corporations, financial systems, and technologies built across countless generations. These structures seem so familiar that they are often mistaken for a natural part o

View this in your browser “Structure organizes relationships. Alignment determines whether they can function coherently.” Prosperity is often explained through the visible components of development. Societies measure advancement through infrastructure, technology, investment, industrial capacity, education, scientific progress, and economic expansion because these factors are directly observable, quantifiable, and deliberately improvable. Institutions organize around the

View this email in your browser “Structure organizes relationships; alignment determines whether they can function coherently.” Misconception When Steve Jobs returned to Apple Inc. in 1997, the company already had capable teams, advanced technologies, and a wide range of products under development. Different groups were executing effectively within their domains, and the organization remained active and coordinated. Yet the overall system had become difficult to underst

View this in your browser “Structure organizes relationships; not all structures can sustain what they generate.” We take it for granted that bands evolved into tribes, tribes into villages, and villages into cities. Yet why did human civilization not remain organized around small kinship groups and localized communities? Why did societies repeatedly reorganize into broader, more complex forms capable of sustaining expanding systems of production, specialization, exchang

View this in your browser “Improvement can increase effort without improving outcomes.” Misconception In the early agricultural settlements established under the Ottoman Empire, where the State of Israel sits today, in the second half of the 19th century, known as Moshavot, farmers received financial support, access to modern agricultural knowledge, and infrastructure designed to support agricultural production. The settlers were educated, and significant resources wer

View this in your browser “What repeats across systems reveals what lies beneath them.” Pattern In the previous column, we traced a trajectory that appeared across domains, geographies, and time, in which human societies evolved from small bands to tribes, from tribes to villages, and from villages to more complex forms such as cities. These transitions did not occur as isolated events but repeated across independent histories, suggesting a consistent direction of deve

View Online and Translate "Systems grow, strain, and reorganize before they truly advance." The Question Over time, it became clear to me that prosperity, as it appears in societies and economies, is not random. This is most evident in how societies organize themselves as they evolve. Patterns repeat across countries, industries, and periods of history: these arrangements invest effort, improve technology, and expand their activity yet do not consistently achieve sustained

View Online and Translate "Prosperity emerges from structured interdependence." Why Definition Matters The question "What is the economy?" may seem theoretical, but it is crucial for understanding how prosperity is created and why poverty persists. Because how we define the economy shapes our views on development, growth, and the factors that influence economic results. If we misunderstand what the economy really is, we risk misinterpreting how prosperity emerges and why

View Online and Translate "Prosperity emerges when structure organizes increasing complexity.” Across countries, industries, and communities, prosperity emerges unevenly. Some systems generate sustained growth and rising incomes, while others, despite significant investment, technological progress, and institutional support, remain trapped in stagnation. This uneven pattern appears across very different environments, suggesting that prosperity cannot be explained solely b

View Online and Translate “Prosperity fails when systems cannot organize the complexity they need or create.” Rising Complexity In the previous column, we examined how economic systems rely on the alignment of signals among participants, and how value chains serve as the structural framework through which these signals travel. When signals reach decision-makers and participants are exposed to outcomes, local decisions begin to align with system-level performance, enabling a

View Online and Translate “The strength of an economy is determined by the strength and coherence of its value chains.” A Known Pattern This pattern is familiar to anyone observing agriculture in developing economies. Knowledge improves, technologies advance, production methods evolve, and logistics become more efficient. Activity expands across the value chain, yet prosperity at the production level often remains limited. This recurring pattern indicates that the key f

View Online and Translate “Efficiency improves activities, while effectiveness enhances results and income. Which do we pursue?” This column continues a short series that began with a simple but troubling observation. Across many developing economies, agricultural productivity has improved steadily over the past decades. Farmers have gained access to better seeds, fertilizers, pest management technologies, irrigation systems, digital advisory services, and a growing range

View this email in your browser “For the farmer, added value is the difference between revenue and cost, and the best channel is the one that widens that gap." From Volume to Value I remember that after each apple harvest, there were always fruits that did not meet fresh-market standards. Some had fallen to the ground, while others were infested, too small, bruised, or visually imperfect. Whatever the reason, it was our task, as children, to follow the pickers and colle

View Online and Translate “When the unexpected strikes, a community’s structure determines how quickly it recovers.” Editor’s Note. This week I had planned to publish the second column in the series Critical Field Notes. However, events in Israel during the past week made it difficult to continue as intended. A personal family experience revealed something striking about how communities respond to sudden shocks, and I felt it was important to share this observation now,