Freakonomics Radio
Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner
Original podcast
It's impossible to say for sure, but the Lebanese do remarkably well. Why?
4,778 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Once upon a time, I was on a plane with Nassim Taleb. He's a philosopher of sorts, and he writes fascinating books, most recently The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile.
Hello, I'm Nassim Taleb. I'm an author and, I would say, a statistical engineer.
Now Taleb is originally from Lebanon. He still goes back a few times a year. He lives just outside of New York City now. And on this plane trip, he told me something I'd never heard before, which was that if you look at 10 or 20 or 30 of the richest countries around the world, that among the richest people in those countries is someone from Lebanon.
When we met last, we were going from London to South Africa on this beautiful trip with extremely hospitable people. So we were going, and then suddenly, we started discussing Lebanese diaspora.
And when he started talking about this, about how successful the Lebanese diaspora is, I had three quick reactions. Number one, interesting if it's true. Two, is it true? And three, if true, why?
From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
So the author Nassim Talib, who is Lebanese-American, tells us that the Lebanese diaspora has been incredibly successful. And he's got some theories, some deep-seated historical theories, as to why that is. But before we get back to him, let's take a closer look at the Lebanese community in the States and elsewhere. We'll start with a friend of mine. His name is George Atala Jr. Remember the junior. George is 35 years old. He works for the NFL Players Association, and he too is Lebanese-American.
All right, so George, if there was one person you could think of who could explain the mysteries of Lebanese prominence and prosperity around the world, where would I go?
You'd have to talk to my dad. He is probably as encyclopedic a character as there is on the Lebanese community. You know, my dad used to always tell me stories about, you know, I will use his accent here, the richest guy in Brazil is Lebanese. The most famous guy in Mexico is Lebanese.
I mean, you have, you read on his name, Carlos Slim. I mean, Carlos is Lebanese.
So I called George Atala's dad.
This is Suzy Lechtenberg. Hi, Suzy.
Hi.
She's a producer on the show.
He was in the midst of a lovely evening when I talked to him.
I mean, I'm sitting by the balcony, looking over Beirut and enjoying a nice glass of white wine.
These days, he splits his time between New York and Beirut. And basically, he echoed much of what his son told you.
Okay. And we should just say that the Carlos Slim that he mentioned is not just the most famous guy in Mexico, but actually the richest man in the world. So, Suzy, tell me a bit more about the Atala family.
Right. So basically, they immigrated to the United States after the civil war broke out in 1975.
I left Lebanon in 1978.
We made our home in Queens, New York.
I was married with a three-month child.
Okay, so that's little George Atala Jr. he's talking about?
Yep, and the family has this classic bootstrap immigrant tale.
My dad had a high school degree, my mom had a high school degree, neither of them went to college.
The elder Atala could only speak a few words of English when he arrived in the United States.
My first language is French, my education is French.
Even so, he became super successful. He got a job as a banker, and he started to build up his client base. And how did he do that? By opening a phone book and looking for Lebanese names.
He looked through the white pages, found anybody whose name sounded like it was Lebanese, and called them up out of the blue.
So the idea is you have a Lebanese last name, do you want to be my client at my bank?
That's right, and just by looking at their names, he could tell even more about them.
So he recognized where the last names correlated with what parts of Lebanon they were from.
Clearly, this guy knows a thing or two about Lebanese names.
Okay, so when I talked to George Jr., he told me about his father's intense pride in their heritage, and that whenever the name of any successful person comes up, George Senior tries to claim that person as Lebanese. Is that actually true?
That is definitely true. Are you ready?
Yeah, I'm ready. Go ahead.
Okay, here it goes.
You have so many, you have so many successful people. You have Casey Kasem, Jamie Farr. Have you heard of Jamie Farr? Corporal Klinger, isn't it? Right!
Yeah, right, Corporal Klinger, right, unmatched, the guy who's always trying to get to Section 8, okay?
Now I know Jamie Farr.
Uh huh.
Uh, you know who else is Lebanese?
Who else is Lebanese?
Everyone else! Like Marlo Thomas?
Yeah, Marlo, she's the daughter of Danny.
Also Helen Thomas, the former White House correspondent.
Uh, Helen, yeah, Helen, Helen, sure, Helen Thomas is Lebanese, no question.
Nice. Who else?
George Mitchell is part Lebanese. Tony Shalhoub is Lebanese, yes? What are you afraid of?
Needles, milk, hide, spiders, sand. I love Tony Shalhoub from Monk, great actor. All right, Suzy, who else?
Well...
John Sununu, Spencer Abraham, the first governor of Oregon, was Attiyah, Governor Attiyah, very successful. The one who started Kinko's is Lebanese. Salma Hayek is Mexican Lebanese. The heart surgeon, the Becky, Carlos Gosp, Joe Hager, Khalil Gibran, Elisaab. You have one famous scientist, also with NASA. But I don't know his name. And who owns the bridge between Canada and Detroit? He's a Lebanese guy, Maroon, Google.
So George Atala Jr. was right. His dad does try to claim just about everyone as Lebanese, even if they might not be.
I mean, I tell you, even athletes, he'll look at his name and he'll say, you know, John Elway is Lebanese. I'll say, what are you talking about? He goes, yes, Alaway, the Alaway family. And we grew up with that all the time. He's just the best when it comes to that stuff. And, you know, we take a lot of pride in our culture, so.
Was anybody, in your father's view, not Lebanese?
Uh, some people were, yes.
Give me an example of someone who plainly couldn't be.
Well, even my Irish principal, Mr. Healy, at one point was considered to be Lebanese. So, and he was clearly not.
As for John Elway, the truth is, we don't know. His name is listed on a website of prominent Lebanese-Americans, but when we tried to ask him directly via the Denver Broncos, where he starred as quarterback and is now an executive, we didn't get an answer. Whatever the case with John Elway, I do understand the Atala family's pride in all things Lebanese. But just think of the successful Italians and Irish and Swedes in this country. Couldn't we make a big list from any of them? Did you know that Nigerians are one of the most educated immigrant groups in America? Did you know that Slovaks have the highest rate of homeownership? And look at the Jews. Jews make up less than 0.2% of the global population,
but more than 20% of all Nobel Prize winners are Jewish. So is the Lebanese diaspora really that successful?
It's very difficult to sort of say across the board they were the most successful diasporas.
Akram Kader is a professor of Middle Eastern history at North Carolina State University. He moved here from Lebanon in 1978 during a long and brutal civil war. While Kader tells us that the Lebanese may not be the most successful diaspora, the data show that, at least in the US, they are doing pretty well.
There's no doubt that if you look at the statistics today, and this is from the census, the Lebanese community, on average, they actually do seem to have, in terms of economic measures, on average, bigger houses, they are more professional in terms of their employment, they have better income. So if one is to take that as a measure, then they're fairly highly successful, yes.
In the US, median household income is about $50,000. For Lebanese Americans, $65,000. Pretty impressive. So what else?
What you find, on average, is that in terms of PhDs, they are usually as many as three Lebanese Americans with PhDs to every one sort of general population American who has a PhD. So they're really much higher rate. In terms of masters, you see a rate of about 2.4 to 1. And bachelor's degree, it's a little lower than that. So on average, I think you will find the most Lebanese Americans, and really, actually, by the way, most Arab Americans tend to be more highly educated than the general population.
So if Lebanese Americans are doing so well, the next logical question is why?
Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what makes the Lebanese do what the Lebanese are so good at doing?
A little bit of adversity results in a little more performance than anything.
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From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
Everyone we talked to for this episode had an opinion as to why the Lebanese diaspora is so successful. George Atala Sr. thinks that success simply courses through their veins.
You know, maybe, maybe in their gene, Lebanese has, in his blood, he's a hardworking, he likes to improve his life, and he has some network that he can count on. If he wants to go into business, I mean, he can call a cousin in Brazil, or a sister in Africa, or whatever. So the network is very important. Plus, he blends in society and adapts very well.
And here's his son, also George, who works for the NFL Players Association.
We tend to trace it back to the folklore of our Phoenician merchant days. All that's part of our history. And I think we pride ourselves on our relationship with people. That's really what I would attribute it to.
Akram Kader, the historian at NC State, pinpoints two pivotal moments in Lebanese history. The country had two major waves of emigration. The first ran from about 1880 to 1920.
The Christians of Lebanon left because they were being persecuted by the Ottoman authorities.
But religious persecution was just one reason.
The reality is, the predominant reason they left is economic. And specifically, what happened in that time period is that the Lebanese economy had become very dependent on silk production.
Kader says a crash in the silk market drove people into poverty, and subsequently, out of the country.
The next exodus came during Lebanon's civil war, which began in 1975. Forty percent of the population left the country.
And basically, the violence led to severe economic difficulties and instabilities between 1975 and 1990. And so what you find is that these university graduates were sitting there trying to figure out what to do, and they could not find jobs, so they would leave.
So these highly educated, middle-class Lebanese fled. Places like Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the US, South Africa, and Australia, which is what leads us to one of the most interesting things about the Lebanese diaspora.
If you look at the diaspora community with these two waves that I spoke about, the 1880 to 1920, we think somewhere around 360,000 left from that time period. And if you sort of multiply by about three, four generations, you know, I mean, you can't really get an accurate number, but by three, four generations, you're looking at about maybe 2 to 3 million globally. Then, of course, from 1975 forward, you have another 1.7 million that left. So ostensibly, there are at least as many Lebanese outside Lebanon as there are within Lebanon.
There are roughly 4.2 million people living in Lebanon today. And we've seen estimates that as many as 15 to 20 million people of Lebanese descent live outside the country. And when they leave, Lebanese stick together. They network, they work hard, they place a lot of emphasis on education, which segues into highly skilled and highly paid jobs.
I think what you find is the two major areas are engineering and medicine. Those were sort of, for myself speaking personally here, you know, I'm part of the 1970, post-1975. I came here in 1978. And at the time that I was attending high school, basically, every good Lebanese boy, every good Arab boy, really had to be a doctor or an engineer. Those were the two venues of success. Those were your entry points into middle and upper-middle class. That's how you would succeed.
Akram Kader did become an engineer, but he was also interested in the humanities. He studied history and, somewhat unusually, women's studies. He is, in fact, the only double major in engineering and women's studies we have ever come across.
I don't know. I have to be quite honest, and I don't know if I should say this. But the truth of the matter is, I took the women's studies course because they told me there are a lot of girls in the class.
So the Lebanese success story really does seem to be about a certain kind of entrepreneurial spirit. But Nassim Taleb says it's more than that. Taleb, you remember, is where we began this episode. He's a Lebanese-American author, most recently of a book called Anti-Fragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. In his view, Lebanon itself and the Lebanese have, in some ways, gained from disorder.
The idea is that in a natural setting, anything natural, anything organic, anything biological, up to a point reacts a lot better to stressors than without. So in other words, now, for example, I'm talking to you on this line. If the line has some noise on it, a little bit of mess here and there, and there's a little bit of noise, then the listeners will grasp the message a lot better and remember it longer. You need a little bit of adversity results in things, or a little bit of strain, a little bit of stressor, result in a little more performance on anything.
And explain, in the case of the phone line, why that is.
You switch from what Daniel Kahneman calls system one to system two, or the reverse, whatever, from one of the system where you're sort of passive and not making an effort to an effortful one. And that switch takes place via a stressor.
So, you know, you prune a tree, it grows stronger, you see. It's the same kind of response, but in a different domain. And when you and I were on a plane, the conversation was definitely about this anti-fragile reaction by people who, when they face adversity, exile, they tend to feel better when you go in the state of diaspora. Then we got to South Africa, and sure enough, the Lebanese diaspora there is very small, but monstrously successful.
All right, let me ask you this then. We had the Ottoman Empire collapse, and the Levant became Lebanon and Syria, and things changed politically there. Then, a very bad civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s, a lot more immigration. And now, the situation in Lebanon is changing daily as we speak, but it's rather chaotic with Hezbollah.
It's not chaotic, it's not chaotic. Let me tell you something, because I go to Lebanon several times a year, I have a place there. In my village, which, incidentally, I have a chapter in Anti-Fragile, what I do is very some comparative analysis. I went to Abu Dhabi, and they were building these universities, hoping to get the people, you know, to have their industrial revolution, stuff like that, and I thought about it. And then I went to my home village that had been destroyed during the war, and now has been richer than ever, you see, with a bunch of villas, and then I realized the value of stressors. So Lebanon has, you know, you're in the news business, you know what the news are, and the news are not about...
The anomalies.
About anomalies, so it's about the lurid. If you take the homicide rate in Lebanon, okay, including the few problems we've had, it's still considerably lower than the States, and vastly lower than Brazil. So, it's much more stable than we think. Now, the other thing about being anti-fragile, Lebanon hasn't gone through war, I think it has some immunity to war, because every time you think the whole thing is going to collapse, like in Syria, nothing happens. And effectively, in the Black Swan, I was warning against pseudo-stability, Syria, the more you stabilize a place, the more a place seems non-chaotic, like today Saudi Arabia, the more it's going to have problems. Or, look at Egypt, all right, it was very stable. Lebanon, on the other hand, is continuous sphere of chaos.
And yet it's very stable. If you look at, if you forget the news and just look on the ground, you see a remarkable stability, even prosperity in spite of everything.
So in Taleb's view, the Lebanese people have developed an inner stability, an inner drive to succeed even, because of a continued fear of chaos. Now, as interesting as you may find his thesis, you may also be tempted to argue with it. There are plenty of countries where chaos and war didn't leave behind a population that was ready to take on the world, quite the opposite in fact. But the success of Lebanese immigrants around the world is indeed something to admire. We should also note, however, that when we talk about the success of one or another group of immigrants, we should focus on one key component of that equation.
These were people who immigrated. Here again is North Carolina State historian Akram Kader.
The first thing that I would say is that anybody who immigrates is already a self-selecting population. In other words, when you make the decision, and this kind of goes in a larger notion, our understanding of immigration is of these sort of desperate souls that are clinging to lifeboats and arriving here and just that's it. It's a very nice narrative, but it's a false narrative. In fact, most people, whether we're talking about the great migration of the 19th century or the current migration, Hispanics, what have you, they don't come here beyond the fact that most of them, the great majority of them, come here to make money with the full intention of going back, by the way. And if you look at the rate of return in the 19th century, that great migration period,
you know, whether you're talking about Germans with 80% return rate, or northern Italians with about 60%, or southern Italians with 30%, or even the Lebanese with about 37%. These people came here, they uprooted themselves from their culture, from their family, from the familiar world they exist in. Many of them, especially in the turn of the 20th century, many of them will not even a word of English. And, you know, today it's a little bit better, but still, people are arriving in this whole new alien place in which they had to have to adjust in all sorts of ways. They're coming here specifically to make money. So it takes a particular kind of individual to do that, right? I mean, it takes somebody who is already self-selecting.
So you're looking at a population that has, you know, has the tools, that sort of entrepreneurial, adventurous, pioneering spirit, personality, mentality. And so that already prepares them to undertake this incredibly risky process, investment, if you will. Now, I must hasten to add, by the way, that not everybody succeeded.
It's a great point that Kater makes. When you look at a big group of people or a big pile of data, our attention is often captured by the bright, shiny success stories, and we forget about everyone that failed. This is called survivorship bias. Let's say I were to ask you to name a high-tech company that started in a garage. What company comes to mind? Depending on your age, you might say Apple, you might say Hewlett-Packard, but what about the thousands and thousands of other people who started tech companies in their garages and failed? They're pretty much forgotten. So, the fact that you are alive to listen to this program means that someone, somewhere
in your family tree, survived. Maybe they beat some long odds, maybe they escaped war, an economic depression, or saber-toothed tiger out for lunch. In any case, congratulations, you made it. And, if you happen to also be Lebanese? Hey, double congratulations.
Hey, podcast listeners. On next week's show, we talk about a little-known fact. Each year in the US, there are roughly twice as many suicides as homicides. Now, why don't people talk about that more? And where are people most likely to kill themselves?
The American suicide belt's comprised of about 10 Western states. It's a sort of wide longitudinal swath, running from Idaho and Montana down to Arizona and New Mexico.
And least likely?
So I'm standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Can suicide be contagious?
Well, it is an odd little meta-problem, isn't it? I mean, I'm doing a story about like whether what I'm doing a story about could possibly cause a suicide contagion.
And can it ever be considered a rational act?
Now, there's an anthropologist in the past, Raoul Narrol, who considered suicide an indication of a sick society. And so in my writings, I've argued it, no, it's an indication of a healthy society. So it, you know, it is a puzzle. It is a paradox, perhaps, we should say.
We revisit the suicide paradox. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.
Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalsky, Borey Lamb, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with help from Ryan Hagen. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.
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