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I am mostly done with a two-week cruise on the Serenade of the Seas. The Voom Internet service is an honest 3 Mbits down and 2 Mbits up. That’s 8X the measured upload speed we had in our Paris hotel. The engineers have done a remarkably good job of covering the ship with wifi. While on Deck 11, I started a FaceTime call with Domestic Senior Management. I then walked up to the top of the ship and all the way down to the cabin my mom and I are sharing on Deck 3. There was a slight hitch in the service just once or twice. The call dropped only once, which was when our button-happy two-year-old on the other side pressed the hang-up circle. The verdict from the other side, a Verizon FiOS link, was “better than any of the calls from Paris.” (one of those calls was from a $600/night Hyatt hotel where a friend was staying) As we got closer to the end of the cruise and more passengers signed up for the service it became subject to more hiccups, but it always worked.

The ping time below is long, as expected given that each packet requires a trip up to space and another one back down. This is noticeable as an extra second or two before a web page is rendered (compared to visiting a domestic site from a high quality home broadband service). Also noticeable is the fact that web developers have larded up their non-mobile pages with so much JavaScript and graphics that even a connection that would have been considered great 10-15 years ago is now somewhat pokey.

As far as I know Royal Caribbean is far ahead of the other cruise lines. The result is that an extended stay on a cruise ship need not cut you off from videoconferences with family, work with Dropbox and Google Docs, etc. Based on the FaceTime calls, which are more demanding than typical business apps, it seems that the High Seas and the full possibilities of the Internet are now compatible.

I tested the service primarily with a Windows 10 laptop, an iPhone (iOS 9.3.3), and an iPad (iOS 9.3.3).

Stuff that worked great:

• Dropbox (uploaded about 30 GB of photographs and videos during the cruise)
• Dropbox photo backup from iPhone
• authoring via Google Docs within Chrome
• Web browser (I ordered some stuff online)
• authoring via WordPress
• downloading the week of iPad app updates that had backed up during the catastrophe of Paris: 1 Gb. That’s 8 Gbits
• downloading iOS operating system updates for iPhone and iPad
• Facebook on every tested platform
• Streaming Netflix to an iPad (brief hiccup every 30 minutes of playing time perhaps)
• IMAP access to AOL email (guess if it was me or my 82-year-old mom conducting this test)
• iPhone backups in the background

Stuff that worked painfully:

• ssh’ing to a Unix server and then trying to edit files with Emacs; the round-trip ping time makes this usable only in an emergency

Stuff that didn’t work at all:

• Napster (formerly Rhapsody; whose idea was it to name a subscription streaming service after the outlawed file sharing system?). I’m wondering if Napster uses UDP. Streaming audio with Google Music worked reasonably well.
• Checking a development server that communicates over HTTP on a nonstandard port and also uses HTTP auth

Summary: Consumers with mobile devices should be thrilled with this as long as they are patient with some hiccups in the very most demanding applications, such as videoconference. Sitting at a laptop in one’s stateroom and using Google Docs, Chrome, and Dropbox, it is often not that different than being at home. (I talked to about 20 other passengers who had signed up for the service. They were generally satisfied but they didn’t seem to understand why it couldn’t be as rock-solid and lightning fast as their at-home broadband connection.)

Room for improvement: the system times out after every two hours of non-usage. If you’re running Dropbox and a browser with Gmail the laptop can in fact stay connected for 24 hours or longer. A phone, however, will go to sleep. Then there is a cumbersome three-page re-authorization process where you tell the system what language you prefer (why can’t it remember that with a cookie?), whether you have a username or an access code, and then finally where you type in the username and password (which the browser has apparently been instructed not to save). This should be a single page prompting for just the password and with a link to “more options” for anyone who wants to change the language or type in an access code. Something about this software made Google Chrome and Windows 10 unhappy, but switching from username/password authentication to an access code (which I got from the guest services folks) made the problem disappear.

I wonder if this will open up even more growth for cruise lines, or at least Royal Caribbean. Now people who either want or need to stay in touch can cruise with only minimal communication hassles and limitations. Time to buy stock in Royal Caribbean? The ticker is RCL (chart).

 

More:

• my full review of the cruise

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Based on my recent informal survey of European cities, all but one have this in common: there are convenience stores every few blocks where you can buy most of the stuff that you’d find in a U.S. 7-11. These are open either 24 hours per day or at least for about 18 hours per day. The exception is Paris. One issue seems to be that commonly sought pills, such as aspirin or ibuprofen, are apparently restricted to being sold by pharmacists. Even the supermarkets don’t stock the common array of pills that you’d find almost anywhere else in the world.

What do folks think? How is it that the French have shut down nearly all commerce at around 9 pm in one of the world’s largest cities? There are a few pharmacies that stay open in case of emergency, of course, but the typical resident or visitor won’t be able to walk a few blocks and find the essentials.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, a novel centered on the fall of South Vietnam and life in America for those who fled. Given that the author is too young to have experienced any of the events it is a remarkable work. Here are some excerpts.

On the differences among governments:

I cashed the check in my pocket, my tax refund from the IRS. It was not a large sum and yet symbolically significant, for never in my country would the midget-minded government give back to its frustrated citizens anything it had seized in the first place. The whole idea was absurd. Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other. Now, despite my sense of fellow feeling for my exiled countrymen, I could not also help but feel that our country was being born again, the accretions of foreign corruption cleansed by revolutionary flames. Instead of tax refunds, the revolution would redistribute ill-gotten wealth, following the philosophy of more to the poor. What the poor did with their socialist succor was up to them. As for me, I used my capitalist refund to buy enough booze to keep Bon and me uneasily steeped in amnesia until next week, which if not foresightful was nevertheless my choice, choice being my sacred American right.

The worst thing about living in America is the corruption. At home, we could contain it in the bars and nightclubs and bases. But here, we will not be able to protect our children from the lewdness and the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much. They’re too permissive. No one even thinks twice of what they call dating. We all know that “date” is a euphemism. What parent not only allows their daughter to copulate in her teenage years, but willingly encourages it? It’s shocking! It’s an abnegation of moral responsibility. Ugh.

On cultural, social, and sexual norms:

But of all the things I learned about her, the most important was this: whereas most Vietnamese women kept their opinions to themselves until they were married, whereon they never kept their opinions to themselves, …

She was the domestic equivalent of her husband, an anticommunist warrior housewife to whom nothing was just an isolated incident but was almost always a symptom by which the disease of communism could be linked to poverty, depravity, atheism, and decay of many kinds. I won’t allow rock music in this house, she said, gripping Madame’s hand to console her for the loss of her daughter’s virtue.

None of my children will be allowed to date until eighteen and, so long as they live in this house, will have a curfew by ten. It’s our weak spot, this freedom we allow people to behave any way they please, what with their drugs and their sex, as if those things aren’t infectious.

Madame had never cooked before coming to this country. For women of Madame’s rarefied class, cooking was one of those functions contracted out to other women, along with cleaning, nursing, teaching, sewing, and so on, everything except for the bare biological necessities, which I could not imagine Madame performing, except, perhaps, for breathing.

But the exigencies of exile had made it necessary for Madame to cook, as no one else in the household was capable of anything more than boiling water. In the General’s case, even that was beyond him. He could fieldstrip and reassemble an M16 blindfolded, but a gas stove was as perplexing as a calculus equation, or at least he pretended so. Like most of us Vietnamese men, he simply did not want to be even brushed with domesticity.

On career opportunities for skilled immigrants:

Likewise in California, he had promised me the best rice porridge in Greater Los Angeles, and it was over a silky smooth white pottage that I commiserated with the crapulent major. He was now a gas station attendant in Monterey Park, paid in cash so he could qualify for welfare benefits.

Many once commanded artillery batteries and infantry battalions, but now they possessed nothing more dangerous than their pride, their halitosis, and their car keys, if they even owned cars. I had reported all the gossip about these vanquished soldiers to Paris, and knew what they did (or, in many cases, did not do) for a living. Most successful was a general infamous for using his crack troops to harvest cinnamon, whose circulation he monopolized; now this spice merchant lorded over a pizza parlor. One colonel, an asthmatic quartermaster who became unreasonably excited discussing dehydrated rations, was a janitor. A dashing major who flew gunships, now a mechanic. A grizzled captain with a talent for hunting guerrillas: short-order cook. An affectless lieutenant, sole survivor of an ambushed company: deliveryman. So the list went, a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile. In this psychosomatic condition, normal social or familial ills were diagnosed as symptoms of something fatal, with their vulnerable women and children cast as the carriers of Western contamination. Their afflicted kids were talking back, not in their native language but in a foreign tongue they were mastering faster than their fathers. As for the wives, most had been forced to find jobs, and in doing so had been transformed from the winsome lotuses the men remembered them to be. As the crapulent major said, A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.

On Vietnamese versus American educational systems:

Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful.

The protagonist goes to the Philippines to help out with a Vietnam War movie:

I felt at home the instant I stepped from the air-conditioned chamber of the airplane into the humidity-clogged Jetway. The spectacle of the constabulary in the terminal with automatic weapons slung on their shoulders also made me homesick, confirming I was again in a country with its malnourished neck under a dictator’s loafer.

He had a Minnesotan’s admiration for resourcefulness in the face of hardship, bred by generations of people one very bad winter away from starvation and cannibalism

The longer I worked on the Movie, the more I was convinced that I was not only a technical consultant on an artistic project, but an infiltrator into a work of propaganda. A man such as the Auteur would have denied it, seeing his Movie purely as Art, but who was fooling whom? Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.

You guys are paranoid, I said. Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies.

I’m not in love with the last portion of the book, which concerns a reeducation camp. Sitting in a comfortable office in Berkeley, California, it is not easy to imagine what the experience of being detained indefinitely is like.

Readers: What did you think of this book?

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There are a lot of obituaries of Seymour Papert, an MIT researcher famous for his work on Logo, the late 1960s/early 1970s programming language for children that was supposed to help them learn math and other technical disciplines. As with most attempts at innovation within the American public school system, this proved to be a failure, but it seems unfair to judge Papert because unionized government workers weren’t effective at coding or teaching coding.

This posting is to share a vicarious memory. One of my advisors at MIT flew to Chicago with Papert in a Bonanza, piston-powered Cessna, or similar light airplane. This was back in the 1970s. FAA records show that Papert had a current medical in 1997 (age 69) and his Private certificate with airplane single engine land and instrument airplane ratings was issued in 1999 (age 71; perhaps this was a reissue somehow? he wouldn’t have been flying to Chicago without an instrument rating). Papert enjoyed teaching what he knew about aviation and used his non-pilot passenger as a navigator for this pre-GPS flight, entrusting him with charts. During the long flight, the passenger learned how to tune and use VORs and read IFR charts. From the perspective of the young professor sitting in the right seat there were some harsh words from ATC in the Chicago area regarding the aircraft’s position within what probably would have been called the “TCA” back then (Class B or “Bravo airspace” today, now that we have adopted ICAO terminology).

It seems that Papert lived to 88, long enough to watch his students work and, in most cases, retire. He flew until at least age 69, something that the current generation of professors won’t even attempt, and did nearly all of those flights in an era when it wasn’t possible to look at a moving map with a big “you are here” symbol. I have raised a Royal Caribbean Bellini to his memory and legacy here on the Serenade of the Seas.

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Our guide in Estonia explained that Estonia was forced by the Soviets to adopt a Socialist economic system in 1944 (Wikipedia history article). Private houses and apartment buildings were confiscated by the state. Farmers were allowed to keep a farmhouse and one hectare of land (2.5 acres) but the rest of their land was turned into communal farms. Families that had previously owned a house were generally allowed to stay in the house but they then had to share with multiple additional families. All of this was then unrolled starting in 1991 when the country became independent once again. Old property records were dug up and real estate was restored to previous owners and/or their heirs, even if those owners had left the country 50 years earlier. People who lived in houses and apartments under the Socialist system were then forced to move out, but they didn’t have enough money to rent or buy a new place due in part to the fact that there weren’t really enough housing units. It took about ten years to sort this all out and get every family into its own place.

What about our guide herself? Her family had a 63-hectare”linen” (flax?) farm that was confiscated and restored. Now they use it as a summer escape to the forest; there are no longer any crops on what had been the fields. Her husband’s family had a 20-hectare farm less than a 30-minute drive from downtown Tallinn. It too was confiscated, but restored to the husband and now they live there with their three children and two dogs.

What kind of political system do people who went from Capitalism to Socialism to Capitalism adopt? “We’re quite conservative,” Siiri explained. She described a streamlined government in which all business could be conducted online. She described taxes as “simple” and explained that people pay a flat 21 percent income tax plus a flat 20 percent consumption tax (VAT, as in the rest of Europe). In addition, employers pay a tax of 33 percent on top of wages to fund pensions and health care. It seems that there is no support for a progressive income tax rate; Estonians are satisfied that a person who makes 5X the average will pay 5X in tax; they don’t dream of a world in which that person will pay 10X or 15X. She expressed pride that Estonia had a budget surplus, a distinction that only Germany shares within Europe. The Heritage Foundation rates Estonia as having more economic freedom than the U.S. and as spending about 38 percent of GDP on government. I think that this number can’t be compared to the U.S. number because the typically quoted U.S. numbers don’t include all of Obamacare and other health insurance spending. (See “Health insurance premiums should be counted as tax revenue?”.) The Tax Foundation says that Estonia has the most favorable tax system within the OECD and it doesn’t double-tax corporate profits (in the U.S. we tax the company first and then tax individuals on the dividend income). It appears that there is in fact no “corporate tax” as such. It is just that the company pays tax on dividends that it is distributing. So where a U.S. company may face a combined 40 percent federal and state corporate income tax rate, the comparable number in Estonia is 0. (Estonia will tax distributed profits, however, just as the U.S. taxes dividends, but at a somewhat lower rate.) This page suggests that capital gains are not adjusted for inflation and they are taxed at the same rate as ordinary income (therefore at a lower rate than most U.S. taxpayers pay if you consider both federal and state rates).

Given the lack of higher tax rates on richer Estonians and the smaller share of the economy devoted to government, is Estonia doing worse than the U.S. for its most vulnerable citizens? “Where are children getting the best education?” suggests the opposite: “For example, Estonia has one of the highest PISA scores in Europe, and only 3% of children are low performers in all three skills, leading the European league table.” (The U.S., by comparison, has 25 percent of its schoolchildren in the “low performing” category that will likely result in their exclusion from the workforce (see “unemployed = 21st century draft horse?”).)

[Separately, I asked our guide in the next port, Riga, Latvia, to tell me what was better about this country compared to Estonia (“aside from the language, culture, and people” I prompted). He surprised me by saying that basically the Estonians were better at everything. They’d set up a lower tax more efficient environment for business and were “some years ahead of us.” Corporate taxes in Latvia are 15 percent (compared to zero, as noted above). Income tax is 25 percent. As in Estonia, all taxes are flat-rate. Our Latvian guide specializes in antiques and historical restoration when he is not managing busloads of cruisers. He lives with his wife on a 75-hectare (185 acres!) farm that is roughly a 30-minute drive from the center of Riga. Latvia went through the same process of confiscation of private property then restoration. Juris said that it took about 10 years to sort out during this last swing.]

I’ll write more about this later, but I wonder if Estonia shows that, once you’ve got free trade agreements in place, there is no per-capita economic advantage to be gained in having a country with a large population. It is apparently not more efficient to run a government for 100 million or 300 million people than for 1 million.

Related:

• Estonia’s electronic ID card for citizens (used for voting as well; let’s hope that nobody cracks into this!)
• “Estonia has the Most Competitive Tax System in the OECD” (Tax Foundation) — given the smaller percentage of GDP that Singapore spends on government, can the tax rates truly be lower than Singapore’s?

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I joined a group of about 25 people on a bus tour from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Half of us were American and half Israeli (from Tel Aviv). Within one hour I heard the following:

• from an American woman: “I don’t feel comfortable seeing so many people with guns.” (Walking by soldiers carrying rifles around Jerusalem.)
• from an Israeli woman: “There really should be someone on our bus with a gun if we’re going anywhere near Jerusalem.”

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During three days in St. Petersburg I questioned various Russians, especially our tour guides, on the question of welfare.

In the Soviet times, every able-bodied adult worked. There were no stay-at-home parents, for example. On the other hand, if you worked the government would make sure that you had a house, food, health care, etc. On the third hand, the “house” might not be so great. One of our guides described living with her parents and brother in a “communal apartment” in which her entire family of four had one room and then shared a kitchen (“three tables”) and bathroom with two other families. “As you can imagine, the line for the bathroom could be long in the morning,” she said, “and we were very happy to get our own apartment in 1975 after 14 years on the waiting list.”

Do Russians offer a plethora of means-tested programs in which the less you earn the more subsidies you get (see “The Redistribution Recession” for an economics professor’s analysis of some of these)? No. It seems that the only government handout that is available is an actual handout of cash. Disabled? You get a “pension”. Single mother? You get a small cash subsidy. Unemployed? You get some cash. (If you continue to be unemployed you will also get training; as in the U.S., the Russian government does not subscribe to the Glengarry Glen Ross “a loser is a loser” theory of employee quality. (near the end of the video clip)) An apartment in the center of the city in a brand-new building, as some low-income families in Manhattan, Cambridge, or San Francisco might enjoy? No. A special debit card that you use to buy food? No. A different price for health insurance than what others pay? No. Once you’ve gotten the government cash you go into the market economy and buy whatever you can afford.

Note that the overall amounts of these cash handouts are small compared to what an American welfare family might get and therefore the welfare standard of living is low (though of course the standard of living for a working family outside of a major city may be quite low by American standards as well). “Your primary safety net is friends and family,” said one Russian.

Isn’t there any way for an able-bodied person to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle without working? “In our school there are mothers who stay at home if the husband has a well-paid job,” said a guide who teaches English in K-12 in what she described as a “wealthy” area. What if the mother was never married and perhaps only slightly acquainted with the father? “She can get 25 percent of his income [as child support], but once men have to pay this they will try to stop working,” she responded. Is there any limit to child support following a brief sexual encounter? The teacher/guide wasn’t sure but she didn’t personally know any women for whom single motherhood, without being preceded by a marriage, had enabled a work-free life.

[Note that the Russian 25 percent formula, if taken on a post-tax basis, would be roughly comparable to the New York or Wisconsin 17 percent of pre-tax income. If in fact there is not a limit, Russia would be unlike Germany and some other Civil Law jurisdictions. Russia would be more like U.S. states such as Massachusetts in that a woman will have a higher spending power if she has sex with a couple of high-income men compared to if she entered into a long-term marriage with a medium-income man.]

Russians with low levels of skill and education and/or who live in obscure parts of the country need Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton rather badly. According to one guide, minimum wage is only slightly over $100 per month (confirmed by CNN; compare to about $2595/month at $15/hour). An apartment in St. Petersburg, on the other hand, costs about $2000 per square meter. The same guide said that a typical apartment was about 75 square meters and therefore cost about $150,000 (i.e., about 115 years of minimum wage income if we use CNN’s numbers). How about getting a mortgage? The interest rate in rubles is typically around 14 percent.

What’s the end-result of this rather meager and extremely simple welfare system? Are people reduced to begging in the streets? Certainly there are fewer beggars in St. Petersburg than in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Compared to the U.S., it does seem as though there are more old people working in retail jobs. One gets the impression that there are quite a few Russians doing jobs that they would rather not do because they need the money.

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While in Israel I talked to a British national who was being sued by a woman named Jennifer. He referred to the divorce lawsuit that he was thus defending as “the Jexit”.

Readers: What innovations in language have you heard or do you expect from the Brexit?

Related:

• a piece on divorce law in the U.K. (completely different from the rest of the EU, as it happens; a child that yields $120,000 in Germany could be worth $millions in Britain)

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Continuing my posts about Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047…

The Mandibles posits a world in which the dollar is no longer a desirable reserve currency for non-U.S. governments and the domestic value has been seriously eroded by inflation. This scenario may sound far-fetched to an American, but it is familiar to a lot of folks in Latin America.

Traditional diversification didn’t protect the characters in the book because (1) anything denominated in dollars fell, (2) the U.S. government ran out of money to pay for entitlements and the salaries of workers and therefore adopted a dual strategy of printing money and taxing savings, and (3) the government simply confiscated hard assets, such as gold, that were held domestically. A character who had a box of gold in a safe place in Asia or Europe would have done okay. Here’s a speech from America’s first Latino president:

Using the powers vested in your president by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, I am calling in all gold reserves held in private hands. Gold-mining operations within our borders will be required to sell ore exclusively to the United States Treasury. Gold stocks, exchange-traded funds, and bullion will likewise be transferred to the Treasury. In contrast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s gold nationalization of 1933, when FDR made his bold bid to rescue our suffering nation from the Great Depression, there will be no exceptions for jewelers or jewelry. All such patriotic forfeitures will be compensated by weight, albeit at a rate that does not reflect the hysterical inflation of gold stocks in the lead-up to this emergency. Hoarding will not be tolerated. Punitive fines of up to $250,000 will be levied on those who fail to comply. Retaining gold in any form beyond the deadline of November 30, 2029, will thenceforth be considered a criminal offense, punishable by no less than ten years in prison. All gold exports from our shores are henceforth prohibited. In retaliation for outside agitators’ attempts to fray the very fabric of our flag, all foreign gold reserves currently stored with the Federal Reserve are hereby confiscated, and become the property of the American government.

I have never liked gold as an investment because I don’t understand how (1) it can be sustainably worth more than the cost of mining (as with oil, at a high enough price there is a lot of additional gold to be found on Planet Earth), and (2) it can be worth as much as a productive asset such as a factory or a piece of real estate. Thus the purpose of today’s posting is to get ideas for what kind of investment strategy would protect an American citizen from a serious decline in our economy and the value of the dollar. Note that I personally don’t believe that we’re likely to have a crisis in the near-term. In my opinion Americans are biased towards thinking that our economy will either grow dramatically or shrink dramatically. Given our European-style welfare state and associated disincentives to work it seems to me that European-style stagnation is a plausible future. That said, a multi-decade stagnation would look like a serious decline when compared to dynamic economies elsewhere. And the whole point of diversification is to protect oneself against unlikely events, as long as the cost is not too high. (As noted above, I think storing bars of gold in a Swiss bank’s safe deposit box is too high a cost.)

Readers: What are your best ideas for keeping assets safe from (a) a decline in the dollar, and (b) sudden or gradual confiscation by the U.S. or a state government?

[One idea: Why not just own commercial real estate in three foreign countries? If these are leased out triple-net there is minimal management hassle involved. The return should be similar to the return on U.S. real estate, which in the long run might not be that different from other financial assets. Own the real estate either directly (name recorded officially as the owner) or as a shareholder in a small foreign company. If things fall apart in the U.S., just move out to where one of the properties is. Presumably there could be some paperwork hassles in declaring this foreign-sourced income every year to the IRS, but the actual taxes wouldn’t be different than they would on a U.S. commercial property, right? The paperwork hassles could be considered the price of insurance against being wiped out by a U.S. financial crisis.]

More: Read The Mandibles.

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Israel is a country of immigrants, which means that many Israelis make the decision to marry in a different legal system from that in which they will get divorced (the fate of 30-41 percent of Israeli married couples, depending on who is counting). At the Museum of the Diaspora, for example, an exhibit shows a guy who was married in Ethiopia and then divorced in Israel:

Based on my discussions with some experienced attorneys, Israeli divorce lawsuit defendants from countries that operate under Civil Law will probably be the ones who wish that they had stayed in their original home. Jewish law provides few financial incentives for divorce plaintiffs. If a man divorces a woman he has to pay her according to the ketubah, essentially a prenuptial agreement. If a woman divorces a man she may not receive any share of the man’s future income (it could still be financially rational for a woman to divorce her husband if she can find someone richer to replace him with). On top of this ancient legal tradition Israel has layered some aspects of British common law. The result of this combination is that what would have been a straightforward procedure in Europe or Russia (examples) with legal fees (if any) limited to a small percentage of total assets can turn into an American-style no-holds-barred war in Israel.

The end of an Israeli marriage results in the parties’ assets being consumed by lawyers in both the government-run courts (about 74,000 cases in 2015) and also in a religious court. A woman who wants to be rid of her husband will sue him in the government court for property division, custody, and child support. The divorce per se is litigated in a religious court, e.g., the rabbinical court for Jews, an Islamic court for Muslims. “The rabbinical court is a lot more efficient than the civil court,” said one lawyer, “but it can still cost [$50,000+] in fees to a separate attorney.”

Israeli plaintiffs who follow economic incentives will sue a husband for property division, custody, and child support in the civil court but not seek a divorce in the rabbinical court. The litigation posture is that she wants to stay married and isn’t interested in a divorce, but she wants to live separately, be the primary parent, and get paid for taking care of the children. Then there is a game of chicken to see who will crack and sue first in the rabbinical court (as noted above, if the woman were to initiative a divorce per se she wouldn’t be entitled to alimony).

Property division is simple in theory but complex and expensive to litigate in practice. It is supposedly a California-style system in which premarital property cannot be obtained by a plaintiff, but property acquired during the marriage is divided 50/50. “There was a Supreme Court decision about two months ago,” said one source, “in which a man had inherited an apartment that was rented out. He deposited the rent into a joint account and that was enough to make the property divisible by the court.” Plaintiffs also may allege that a defendant has hidden assets and don’t need any documentary evidence to keep the allegation alive through a final trial. If there are assets worth fighting over, litigation can take more than three years. “If there are 1 million shekels in assets [$250,000] the fees will end up being about 1 million shekels,” said the attorney. As in the U.S., a judge can order a defendant to pay a plaintiff’s legal costs but this may be only 20 percent of the “real costs.”

What happens to the joint apartment (standalone houses are rare in Israel) during the three years of litigation? “The court cannot order the husband out,” said the attorney, “unless the wife makes an allegation of domestic violence, so either the couple negotiates or, more commonly, the wife accuses him of physical or psychological abuse.” (A variety of U.S. states have a similar system; see “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track” and Amber Heard)

Israel is not a great jurisdiction for profiting from extramarital sex. Unlike many U.S. states where it is more profitable to have sex with a high-income person than to be in a long-term marriage with a middle-income person (some numbers), in Israel child support starts by considering the needs of the child. This in contrast to the U.S. system in which the primary factor determining profitability is the income of the target of the child support lawsuit (see the History chapter for how the big switch happened around 1990). Child support can still be profitable in Israel if there was a marriage and a shared household for at least a year or two. Now the defendant can be ordered to pay to keep the children in the lifestyle to which they were accustomed during the marriage and the only way to enable that is also to keep the plaintiff in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. If the litigants just met for one night in a bar, however, the official standard for child support is more based on the cost of rearing a typical Israeli child.

As noted in a July 23 posting, custody lawsuits are simple if the child(ren) are under 6: Mom wins. Mom also is guaranteed to be the one receiving child support, even if the children live with their father. As in the U.S., legal fees can be expended to determine a child’s schedule but the end result is nearly always that children are entitled to spend every other weekend with the father (Friday morning until Saturday evening or Sunday morning) plus a few hours on a weekday. With older children, 50/50 schedules are possible though the cash continues to flow from father to mother even when the two parents have equal incomes or when the mother earns more than the father. The mother’s revenue is reduced to one third at age 18 when a child will enter the military and cut off at age 21 (compare to full cashflow through 21 in New York or 23 in Massachusetts).

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