Episode Details

Economies are supposed to get rich by moving from agriculture to industry to services — that's the Petty-Clark hypothesis, one of the most robust patterns in development economics. But is it a law or just a description of what happened to happen? This episode digs into the mechanisms behind the sectoral transition, from productivity gains to Baumol's cost disease, and then looks at Israel as the extreme case: a country that compressed two centuries of economic development into fifty years. The result is a tech sector that generates enormous national wealth — and a dual economy where most of that wealth never reaches ordinary households.