🍫Ideas Don’t Have Feelings🍫
Why do bad ideas persist?
“Until the lion learns to hunt, every story will glorify the hunter.” -African Proverb
Synagogues are not dying—and we need to stop acting like they are.
I often hint at the many bad ideas that circulate in Jewish life, but rarely call them out directly. But this week, I need an idea to demolish in order to demonstrate this week’s big idea. And since it is the end of the programmatic year for most synagogues, few narratives make my blood boil like the persistent myth that synagogues are collapsing.
In North America, synagogues remain, by far, the most affiliated Jewish institution. Yes, fewer people are joining than in the past (and even that may be leveling off), but people are not leaving synagogue to choose some other Jewish institution. They are leaving not to join anything.
Despite this, good luck finding significant philanthropic investment in synagogue growth. Once upon a time, many federations had entire departments devoted to strengthening synagogues. Today, almost none do. A handful of organizations still serve synagogues directly, but even they often have to justify, repeatedly, why those dues should be spent on helping the very communities that fund them.1
Maybe you disagree. That’s fair.
But if you don’t—if you believe synagogues still matter—then it’s time we ask the more complex question: Why has this false narrative taken hold, and what will it take to turn the tide?
That brings us to this week’s idea.
Survivorship Bias
The Jewish world may feel conflicted about synagogues…
…But it’s head-over-heels for startups.
As synagogue membership declined, a new narrative emerged: that alternative models of spiritual community would replace them. And let me be clear—I love these models. Independent minyanim and alternative spiritual communities are where I feel most at home as a Jew.
But intentions aside, the broader ecosystem embraced this innovation moment with open arms, championing the new, while sidelining the institutions still serving the majority of Jews. This happened in spite of the fact that many leaders of these startup communities actively rejected the idea that their goal was to “replace” the synagogue, as opposed to demanding that Jewish communities aim for a higher quality prayer Jewish experience.
If that sounds backwards, it is.
And it’s also a textbook example of this week’s big idea: survivorship bias.
Encyclopedia Britannica defines the survivorship bias as “a logical error in which attention is paid only to those entities that have passed through (or “survived”) a selective filter.”2 Let’s put that into a Jewish communal context:
Imagine that, over five years, your community witnesses the establishment of ten new spiritual initiatives designed to replace, supplement, or challenge traditional synagogues. Fast forward a decade: seven no longer exist. Two are still around, but largely stagnant. One becomes a breakout success—the kind of place written about in articles and studied in board meetings.
Suddenly, everyone wants to know: “How can we be more like Community X? What is standing in the way of creating more communities like X?”
There’s nothing wrong with that impulse. Community X is visionary, and we should learn from it, when possible. But what about the nine communities that didn’t make it?
Survivorship bias is what happens when we focus all our energy on the outlier that worked and ignore the many that didn’t. It’s not that the success isn’t real—it’s that we mistake the exception for the rule. As Brendan Miller points out in the article for the BBC, “if everyone was succeeding by taking a big risk, it can’t have been that big a risk, nor the odds that daunting.”3
Generally speaking, the conventional history of survivorship bias begins with Abraham Wald, a man who was asked to help reduce aircraft casualties among the Allied Forces during World War II. You can view a version of the report here, but in essence, Wald found that the United States military was only examining the damage to planes that returned from battle (i.e., the ones that survived) and not devoting sufficient energy to understanding what happened to the aircraft that did not survive.4 While there is now some revisionist history regarding whether Wald actually discovered this, the idea of survivorship bias remains: people tend to pay far more attention to what survives than to what does not.5
Fast forward to the present, and our friend Richard Thaler is credited with popularizing the idea of survivorship bias in many of his writings on behavioral economics. In a 1997 paper with Jeremy Siegel, Thaler and Siegel argue that investors do not spend enough time looking at financial models that failed, which skews their understanding of the likelihood of success.6
Now, back to synagogues…
One of the reasons that we constantly underappreciate synagogues is that the survivorship bias often takes hold in the Jewish community around startups. When a startup thrives, it’s magical: the leaders should be studied, and the best practices should be taught. However, we should never forget that alongside this one excellent model are dozens of other models that failed. Many synagogues are not groundbreaking, but they do incredibly important work in a proven model, and that’s OK. Why punish them for that?
However, turning this into a strategy has proven highly challenging. And that brings us to this week’s book recommendation.
Zombie Economics
Pretend for a moment that I am right, and that the Jewish Community accepts conventional wisdom about synagogues that has long since been disproven. Why does the idea persist?
Meet the world of zombie ideas, and this week’s book recommendation, John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics.
John Quiggin, an Australian economist, explores why certain long-disproven economic theories continue to shape policy—often with devastating consequences, like lost jobs and billions in wasted resources. Despite being debunked, these ideas still find champions in academia, think tanks, and public discourse, refusing to die the death they deserve.7
One of Quiggin’s most interesting strategies is to invoke Karl Popper’s critique of Dr. Sigmund Freud. Freud famously argued that in the case of the Oedipus Complex, a son’s hatred of his father was “evidence” of the complex—but a son who didn’t hate his father was in a “repressed Oedipus Complex,” also proving the theory.8 As Popper points out, “a theory that can’t be refuted by any conceivable evidence isn’t really a theory at all.”9 Quiggin writes that, "the ultimate zombie [idea] is one that is completely invulnerable,” because it is “immune from refutation.”10 But this supposed invulnerability is actually a “terminal flaw” that dooms the idea in the long run, because an untestable idea is useless for understanding or improving reality.
This brings us back to synagogues.
When synagogue membership declines, this is seen as proof that the narrative is true. But even when synagogues persist—and they have, for decades, albeit smaller in size—this is explained away as evidence that they are merely “not dead yet.” Either outcome—shrinkage or survival— validates the same idea.
Meanwhile, how many attempts to create synagogue alternatives have quietly disappeared, forgotten because they failed to attract enough funding, leadership, or long-term interest? Survivorship bias ensures that we remember the rare successes—but not the dozens that fade away, leaving little behind.
You might argue that I’m knocking down a straw man here—that few people really believe synagogues are doomed beyond saving. That’s a fair critique. But ultimately, conventional wisdom becomes conventional funding patterns, and this idea’s persistence results in a deprivation of resources that only hurts Jewish vitality in the long run. If synagogues remain the choice institution of the majority of engaged Jews, not funding strengthening synagogues is tantamount to dismissing the dominant choice of the Jewish community.
You may be wondering…
“What are some other zombie ideas that we need to discard?”
Stay tuned…
EconTalk
900
The number of bills introduced in 49 states across the United States limiting the rights of transgender individuals in 2025.
What I Read This Week
Can You Climb Everest Too Quickly?: Remember when the Olympics banned full-body swimsuits because the suits made racers swim too fast? Today, the climbing world faces a similar conflict over climbing Mount Everest with the aid of xenon gas. Although I could not climb Everest with or without it.
Who Wrote the Bible?: I suppose this was inevitable, but with the advancement in large-language models, computers are starting to analyze the biblical text to see if they can recognize the language patterns of different authors and redactors. I suspect they will find more than J, E, P, & D.
Suspect Arrested in Crypto Torture Scheme: I really didn’t need any more reasons to explain why I don’t plan on buying or investing in cryptocurrency. But a torture scheme where someone tried to force someone into revealing their crypto passwords certainly helps my case.
Being Queer and Religious: In honor of Pride Month, here are a few memoirs of people who grew up in different religious communities and share their experiences as LGBTQ+ individuals. And let me also add another round of applause for subscriber Idit Klein, the legendary CEO of Keshet, who just stepped out after an incredible, hall-of-fame tenure. Working with Keshet was one of the career highlights.
Has Nutella Met Its Match?: Do I have readers who understand why I will include an article about Nutella? Yes, I do. Yes, I definitely do.
Yes, I used to work at one of them, and every day I did meaningful work.
And every day, you’d be amazed how many people would ask,
“Why should money provided by synagogues for synagogues actually go to support synagogues?”
Yes, that’s an actual question asked on more than one occasion.
Abraham Wald, A Reprint of 'A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors (Alexandria: Center for Naval Analyses, 1980).
Here is a helpful summary if you want to learn more:
Warning: Quiggin is no fan of concepts popular among many U.S. conservatives, such as the belief that cutting taxes on the wealthy will ultimately benefit the poor—so-called “trickle-down economics.”)
You may disagree with him, and that’s perfectly fine. But whether or not you share his politics, grasping the idea of the zombie idea—an idea that “keeps coming back, despite being killed”—is essential to the questions this newsletter wrestles with.
If you believe that the best economic policy is always to raise taxes, then when the economy improves after a tax hike, you claim success. But if the economy worsens, you insist that taxes weren’t raised enough. The same circular reasoning applies in reverse for those convinced that cutting taxes is always the solution.
Feel free to disagree, but I believe that people should feel comfortable being brutal to any idea, so long as they don’t directly address that brutality to the person who is advocating that idea. Ideas don’t have feelings, but people do.
Ibid.
Ibid.