In June the Taub Center published its annual portrait of Israeli society and the numbers told a story that should have been impossible. High technology workers in Israel now earn nearly three times the average wage in the rest of the economy, up from 2.2 times in 2012. Research and development spending runs at the highest ratio in the OECD, nearly double the average. Yet labour productivity across the economy as a whole remains low relative to comparable high income countries, and the gap is widening. Israel has one of the most educated populations on earth, but in the OECD’s adult skills survey its average score sits below the mean. In the Arab population the deficit reaches a full standard deviation.

An economist called Steve Dowrick would have recognised this pattern immediately. He spent most of his career explaining why the forces that ought to make countries converge so often do not.

Before Dowrick became one of the most important growth theorists of his generation, he drove a van. He was a young Dubliner, freshly out of the Quaker school in York, and he had been offered a scholarship to read theoretical physics at Cambridge. But before beginning, he spent a year at Blackfriars Settlement in Southwark, driving a van for a project called Workshop for the Disabled. The streets were narrow. The poverty was not.

That year changed everything. When Dowrick did arrive at Cambridge, he abandoned physics for the social sciences. A decade later he........

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