back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal. I am joined today by a guest who has a lot of relevant expertise in the area of socioeconomics in Israel. I've done videos recently about the cost of living here, the cost of housing, a lot of social issues, which I'm always complaining about, never received the attention that they deserve in Israeli elections, of which there have been plenty in recent years. So in order to get a bit of clarity on that, joined today by a professor, Dan Bendavid, who's a president at the Shoresh institution who do absolutely amazing work at furthering socioeconomic research. And they also have a terrific graph library on their website that anyone can access. Very interesting comparisons between Israel and other countries in the OECD. Dan is president at the Shoresh institution. He's also an economics professor in the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University. And he recently contributed a very interesting five-part blog series to the Times of Israel, among many other accomplishments. So firstly, Dan, thanks for joining me. Thanks for inviting me. I want to talk firstly about, you've mentioned on the Shoresh website that you see there being three fundamental problems with Israel. Can you tell me what those are? Maybe in the way of background, why we focus on these issues. Shoresh was a, we established Shoresh eight years ago to focus on the fundamental root, Shoresh in Hebrew is root. The root determinants of where Israel is heading. What determines our long-run trajectories are very, very steady and very unsustainable long-run trajectories. The three primary problems are certainly not the entire list, but three of the problems that we focused on were first and foremost, level of education in Israel, the way that we're preparing our children for the future. The level of education in core subjects in math, science and reading is at the very bottom of the developed world. All 25 of the developed world countries are above us. The second issue is not only are we at the bottom, half of the children today in Israel are receiving a third world education, roughly half, and they belong to the fastest growing parts of the population. One group with roughly over a fifth, in fact, of the children are the Kharidim. Most of whom don't even study the material, don't take the international exams. They're not even the reason why we are formally below the entire developed world. Had they taken exam, we would have been, we would have had even a lower score, even though we'd still be at the bottom. They are over a fifth of the first grade children today in Israel. Another group with over a fifth of the children are the Arab kids, Arab-speaking children in Israel, and they score below not just the entire first world, but below many third world countries. In fact, there were 10 predominantly Muslim countries that participated in the most recent PISA exam given by the OECD, and our kids, our Arab children, scored below nine of the 10 Muslim countries. So the Arab kids in Israel and the Kharidim alone are nearly half of the children. To them, you can add the kids who grew up in the periphery, geographic periphery, social periphery, that are also getting a third world education. And these children belong to population groups that are growing the fastest in Israel, which makes this basically unsustainable. We're doing fine today economically. Again, last three months, the exception. But in general, we're doing okay in recent years, but the direction that we're headed is A, very, very steady, and B, it's unsustainable. And that basically causes us to be concerned about the future, and Shoesh was created to try and analyze what are these underlying issues. The third problem that we focused on is where's the money going? If we want to fix things, we need money. And in Israel, there are two main issues in this regard. A is that the pie itself isn't very big. The amount of money that we have, primarily because we have a huge shadow economy in Israel. A shadow economy is economic activity, legal and illegal economic activity that's not reported and therefore not taxed. And according to the World Bank and IMF, it's roughly about a fifth of GDP. So if we were to tax that at about a third of that amount, then we would be able to, I mean, if we were able to even reduce the shadow economy to levels of France, Canada, law abiding countries, not even eliminated completely, we would add enough tax revenue that would more than double all our expenditures on health. It would be much more than anything that we spend on primary secondary education or academic education and so on. So we would give us a lot more resources. That's part of the issue. The other part is where does the money go? And in this case, we have a major problem of non-transparency. The budget has thousands and thousands of budget items, but you can't really collect them in a way that can tell you who's receiving the money. And so all we can do is say, we look at the total amount, which is what it is, and we can also see where it hasn't reached in terms of the outcomes, education, infrastructure and so on. And the issues are problematic. So that issue is a create a bigger tax revenue, basically, which would also enable us to reduce the tax burden, at least on some of the people in Israel that are paying the taxes, while also having a lot more available to deal with the root issues that Israel need to deal with. You mentioned, Dan, in one of your Times of Israel, it's a five-part series. I'll put a link in the description for anyone who's interested. It's really worth reading. And I think in one of your pieces, you sort of talk about the 1970s as being this kind of real pivot point in Israel that the country was doing relatively well. It was obviously very new at that point. And it's sort of deflected. There is in one of your graphs on the Shores Institution site, you have a very interesting one that shows the extrapolated course of growth up to the 70s, GDP per capita growth, I believe, and it's less than that. You mentioned in your blog that it was sort of the started government policy favoring specific interests over the greater interest. Can you talk a little bit about that and also in terms of the income inequality growing since that point? First things first, the fact that we were a relatively young country or poor country doesn't mean that we should be growing faster. It may seem intuitive that a poor country, all it needs to do is copy information rather than invent it. I'm not even talking about illegally copying, but you don't have to invent the wheel. Just learn how to use the wheel. So on the face of it, poor countries should be growing faster than wealthier countries because they're just catching up. That's just not happening. I'm a growth economist. That's one of my areas of specializations. It's one of the first thing that we teach the students is to move that illusion out of the way. The average growth rates of very poor countries are roughly 2%. Average growth rates of wealthy countries, roughly 2%. The variability is much bigger for the poor countries because some of them are actually on track and others are poor because they're mishandled. The primary thing that affects a growth is basically policy. Israel, in that regard, was very unique. When it was created, on the one hand, finding wars where we didn't even know if we'd be alive at the other end of the wars, rationing food because people were inundating Israel with only the clothes on their backs, either Holocaust survivors or refugees from the Arab countries, and while rationing foods and building towns for these people and roads and so on, the founding fathers somehow found the wherewithal to create research universities and hospitals and the things that you need, basically, to move a country on a path to catch up with the other countries. And we were growing like crazy. We were growing very, very quickly until the mid-70s. We were catching up with the leading developed world countries. However, and that's a big however, what happened was that the same party was in power for basically 25 years until the Yom Kippu War. They became quite arrogant and increasingly corrupt in some cases, and people got tired of them once the Yom Kippu War was understood as a big debacle, basically a preparedness. Basically, we as the nation decided not just to throw out the water, but the baby with the water. And it was a process. It took us a few years after the war, but in 77, we basically threw them out and we began what cemented our new trajectory. We never recovered from the war and returned to our old path. We moved to a much shallower and a very steady path, a 50-year path, basically almost 50 years since the mid-70s, which is relatively slow growth. If you compare Israel's growth to the countries that were similar to us in the early 50s, we grew faster than them until the 70s. If you compare Israel to countries that were similar to us in terms of income per capita in the early 70s, we grew slower than most of them until recently. So we really moved from being leaders to the back of the pack in terms of countries that were similar to us at the beginning of the period. And the reason primarily that affected our growth path before the 70s and after the 70s, it has to do with national priorities. Where does the money go? If it goes to building the infrastructures that you need to grow, infrastructures are not just physical, not just roads and rail and so on, but also human capital, education. We built universities, good universities, that created basically the foundations for an entire high-tech sector. Nobody knew what high-tech would be. Nobody could guess what it would be, but we still had a Technion and a Hebrew University and Tel Aviv and Weizmann and so on around so that their graduates were able to capitalize on this in the 80s and 90s. So these foundations were built once upon a time, but since the 70s we neglected them. If you look at the investment in higher education, for example, the number of senior faculty per capita roles exponentially from 1948 from more of an independence until 1973, we nearly reached American levels within 25 years in terms of the number of faculty per capita. Since then it's just taken a freefall, falling by 60% steadily since the 70s. If you look at the number of beds per capita in Israel, hospital beds, they were relatively stable until 1977, the year of the pivot to national priorities. And ever since then they've been dropping like a rock so that we have one of the most congested hospital system in the world. People get sick as a result of it and so on and so on and so on. You can basically follow this in one area after the other, congested roads. They were, we had congested on the road. Number of vehicles per kilometer roads identical to the small European countries in 1970. Today's nearly three times that level, although we have many fewer vehicles per capita because we're poor and the vehicles cost more money. It's just a very severe lack of investment in the areas that benefit the national good. Instead, the money was diverted into other areas. Again, we don't have budget transparency so I can't tell you how much went here and how much went there, but we know just like we know from the outcomes where it didn't go. We also know from outcomes at least some of the directions that it did go. For example, the Haridim, the ultra orthodox were never in any government coalition until the pivot in 1977 ever since then. They've been in nearly all of the government coalitions and they have a price. And that price is actually tremendous. It's not just money.  And the increase in money led to two primary things among the Haridim. One of them was basically a free fall in male employment. Israelis tend to think that Haridim males never worked in Israel. Well, actually in the late 70s over 80% were employed. And that fell to less than 40% over 30 years. And then when you look at fertility rates, fertility rates went from six children per family to seven children per family, just one decade, the 80s. And then they rose above seven in the 90s and early 2000. So we know where the money went. It went, that's one direction. Another direction was after the Six Day War, this began already in 1967. Israel grew. We developed Sinai, which we eventually returned. We developed the West Bank and Gaza, Gaza that we returned West Bank. I'm not going to go into all the politics and the story behind it, but clearly that cost money to build. And that came at the expense of the other stuff, of the stuff that benefited the national good. It went to sectoral interests and personal interests. You can see it in the caliber and the type of politicians and their interests that we have today. How many of them are thinking about the greater good and how many of them are thinking about their own very small electorate and nothing else? I think a common objection that people would have done when you say that, for instance, okay, our hospital network isn't where it should be. You mentioned, we've talked a lot about the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development, which has 38 different countries in it. And I sort of wonder how fair do you think the comparison is between Israel and these other countries? Do you think it's fair that Israel can be compared internationally? Because people would object when we talk about stuff like the investment in education and all that, that it's because Israel has extraordinary defense costs. But based on what you're saying, it doesn't really sound like that's necessarily the full picture for why the money isn't going where it should. Defense has always traditionally been an excuse. We don't have enough leftover for civilian uses because we spend so much on defense. But one of the graphs in the graphs gallery on the Shoesh website that you can see is we net out defense spending. So we show public civilian expenditures, public expenditures, net of defense in Israel and in the OECD. And from the mid-60s until about a decade and a half ago, we were spending at least as much as the OECD average. And during the time of the pivots in the 70s and following in the 80s, we actually spent a lot more than the OECD civilian money, not defense. Defense is on top of that. So there was no lack of money to stop going in the directions that it should have been going. Let's put it this way. The relevant comparisons for Israel are developed world countries. All of the developed world countries are in the OECD. Not all of the OECD countries are developed. That's a different story. But when we show the comparisons, we compare Israel to all of the OECD countries and let the reader decide who he wants to compare to. But in general, not all of those countries are relevant, certainly. Only the developed ones are. And the reason the developed ones are is because we have the capacity to be at the top of the top. Our universities are cutting edge. Our high tech is cutting edge. Our physicians are state of the art. There is no reason why we shouldn't be at the top of the developed world and not floundering way, way below and falling further and further behind. Let's talk about income inequality. So income inequality measured by the the Gini coefficient with, you know, one being perfect inequality, but it's a measure of the level of income inequality in an economy. And what I thought was interesting from your graphs is we're seeing kind of the income inequality steadily catching up in Israel since the 70s. Just just as you say that pivot point occurred. And now it seems we have quite a high level of income inequality. The the figure I got was that we're about 10% less unequal than the US, which of course is very, very unequal as economies go. So there's a lot of sort of theories for reducing incoming inequality, bringing more people into high tech where there's significantly better conditions and salaries. Where is incoming inequality in Israel today relative to the OECD and how do you think it can be reduced? Actually, we can talk about income inequality and poverty. The way we measure poverty is a relative measure. So it's sort of income inequality. Because we look at the share of people below the poverty line and the poverty line is half of the median income. So it's a relative measure as well. And in both of these cases, Israel is kind of a study in irony. On the one hand, when you look at say poverty in in gross incomes, we don't have a problem. Poverty and income in gross incomes in Israel. In other words, in terms of what we are able to make, we have one of the lowest poverty rates in the OECD. However, what matters is not poverty and gross incomes of poverty and net incomes. And in terms of poverty and net incomes, we have one of the highest, if not the highest rate poverty rate in the OECD. In other words, we're sitting at both ends of the OECD and that only highlights how much we have control over the situation. In other words, what happened was the source of the issue is or the source of the explanation has to do with a natural experiment that Israel did in the past two decades.  It was in a deep dive.  We reached nearly five shekels to the dollar, $4.99 to the dollar in June 2002. And the government had huge deficits and high debt ratios. And it was clear that it needed to cut the budget. Actually, the finance minister at the time is our current prime minister, Netanyahu. And he did the right thing. He basically cut the budget. And while Sharon was taking care of Sharon, the prime minister was taking care of the terrorism, Netanyahu was taking care of the economy. And he slashed the budget, basically. And that included, among other things, cutting benefits. These benefits that had gone through the ceiling because of the Kharedim and all these other special interest groups were slashed. That led, among other things, it led to a drop in fertility rates among the Kharedim temporarily until the money started flowing again. It also led to an increase in the Kharedim male employment rates and female employment rates. But the biggest thing is that it induced people that had never worked or hadn't worked for years to start working for the first time. And that showed the conundrum that we have here. It wasn't that we had planned this, this was like an outcome of a natural experiment. We needed to save the economy so we slashed the budget and forced people to work. So we showed that it is possible to force people to work. But we left out the other part of the equation, which is giving them the skills to work and the tools to work in a modern economy. So basically, we had people that now began to work. So they are all of a sudden above the poverty line in terms of gross incomes, because they had no money before and now they have money. So it moves them above and things look better. But the money that they earned was so low because they still don't have skills that it didn't make up in many cases for what they lost in terms of benefits. And so in terms of net incomes, we have very high poverty rates and high inequality rates because the people who are working have been deprived of the basic skills to work in a modern economy. We have very lousy schools, as we mentioned at the outset of our talk, and a very bad follow-up in terms of vocational training and so on. Not to mention the other infrastructure to bring in what we call periphery, make them suburbs basically by a normal transportation infrastructure and so on. So these deficits basically inhibit the income or reduce the income potential of people who are now forced to work but are not earning very much, not earning as much as they could otherwise. Is this stand reflected in because I know one thing that people have mentioned a lot is that the per capita productivity in Israel has historically been very low. So is that figure a reflection of the fact that a lot of people were maybe brought into the workforce but weren't necessarily being very productive? What exactly does that per capita productivity number reflect? You raise an important point. One of the misconceptions in the public discourse, not just in Israel but across the entire developed world, is that either I'm using American terms of bleeding heart and liver all I care about is taking care of the poor and the impoverished and reducing inequality or I'm some crazy greedy capitalist all I care about is economic growth because you can't have both. So you need to find an optimum between the two. That's the way most people think. That's what driving a lot of the policy decisions and it's simply incorrect. I mean it is correct if we're dealing with symptomatic solutions. In other words, I have poor people. How do I help them? Give them money. How do I raise the money? I need to raise taxes. If I raise taxes, I inhibit the desire to work and to invest. That hurts growth and therefore either or. But dealing with the root causes of poverty and inequality means giving people the tools to work in a modern economy, giving them a better education, giving them the conditions of surrounding environment, connecting them with infrastructure and so on so that they can easily make it to where the jobs are and so on. That clearly helps them out. So you're going to have less poor people as a result of that. But in addition, it helps growth because you have now included a lot more people in the economy with better skills and a better ability, higher productivity, which leads to faster growth. Think of an engine. You have all the cylinders of the engine and we're running on fewer and fewer cylinders because we're not including everybody. We're not doing them a favor by including them. We need them. We need them to start running this engine. Just to give you an example from the opposite direction, taxes. When we look at income taxes, half the population in Israel today is so poor, they pay no income tax. They don't reach the bottom rung of the income tax ladder. 20% of the population alone funds 92% of all the income tax in Israel. And that's steadily rising over time. It was 83% 20 years ago. So if we don't include them, it means more of a burden on the few who are holding up an entire country. So again, this is not altruism. We need these people. We need to give them the skills and tools to work in a modern economy. And by the way, one of the things that became very clear in recent months is that giving them a good education is not just giving them the tools to work in a modern economy. It also means giving them the tools to understand how a modern democracy works, what it means, what checks and balances are, what the difference is between majority rule and tyranny of the majority, which apparently most Israelis don't have a clue about. So all of these things are very important when it comes to voting. In a democracy, if you want to save the democracy, you need people to know what they're voting on and what kind of impact it's going to have on their future. An interesting study I've come across before, Dan, is that there's of course a huge amount of talk about high tech and recently that the foreign venture capital flows are already decreasing and we're seeing apparently money leaving Israel because of political uncertainty. And of course, the day before we recorded this interview, Moody downgrading Israel's international credit rating, which is going to have potentially other ramifications. But this very vaguely defied high tech sector, which I've struggled to get an exact definition of even from the CBS, but I think they said it's based on the percentage of workforce and R&D. But if we can just accept high tech to be the technology players that are in Israel, when you talk about giving people a better education to increase their workforce participation, does that mean just getting people into these very specific tech careers? What would you say for those who might say certain people just don't have an affinity for work in these industries? No, the whole point, it goes in the opposite direction. In other words, the way economic growth works is that productivity improvements drive economic growth, which means you have an increasing demand all the time, increasing demand for skilled and educated workers, people. You need more and more such people, not just for high tech for anything, instead of people who clean the streets with brooms, you have one guy driving this machine, not high tech, but it needs to have a driver's license. You have a garage mechanic who at least knows how to hook up a computer to the car, get all the diagnostics immediately, and he can do three times more vehicles in one day than he could have otherwise. Not everything is high tech, but you need some basic skills. What we need to do is increase the supply of people with those skills, which means drive down the supply of people that lack the skills. Clearly, not everyone can do all these things, but the moment that you drive out all the people who are able to, clearly they're going to be better off because they're going to have higher employment rates and higher wages. But the people that you left behind are also going to be better off because they're now competing with less others for the decreasing number of jobs available for such people. It's the only way to deal with it. Israel, what we're doing is not only inundating the workforce with people without the skills, by not giving them the skills in education and so on, but we're also importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers from abroad who are unskilled and uneducated and basically just making a bad situation a lot worse. So we're doing the opposite of what we need to be doing. We need to move as many people out of the uneducated or less educated and unskilled categories into the categories where the demand is increasing. How do you say this paradox whereby, I mean, I think if we flash on the news at any given day, you read about sort of the amazing research being done at some of the Israeli universities, Hebrew University, constantly making amazing scientific discoveries, Israeli startups, a lot of very world-changing technology come out of here. So it seems like there is centres of excellence that are really thriving in Israel. Do you see the problems we're seeing in Israel more, so it's related really to sort of the primary school or does it extend throughout the education system all the way to postgraduate level? No, the problem is primarily in the primary schools and secondary schools. Primary schools are the feeder to the secondary schools or then the feeder to the higher education. Let me take a step back. One of the things that we know has a huge impact on scholastic achievement, not just in Israel, everywhere in the world is parental education. The more educated parents are, the more they can help directly their children. They tend to be wealthier so they can live in better neighbourhoods with better schools. They can buy tutors and so on. That exists everywhere. The question is, to what extent does the public education system combat that? In other words, how does it help those whose parents are relatively uneducated to overcome that deficiency and still make it into basically the high-tech and so on? In that regard, Israel, again, has one of the worst education systems in the developed world. We are one of the least capable of being able to do that anywhere. We're not even trying with Haredim or the children already. We're just sweeping that under the rug, but that's a group that's multiplying every 25 years. Every generation, the share of Haredim and Israel's population is doubling. That's an exponential function. We haven't even spoken about what's going on in that community, but that's just going to end date everything according to the Central Bureau of Statistics in 40 years after the children in Israel between the ages of 0 and 14 are Haredim. We're talking about things that we need to deal with while ignoring the elephant in the room here that's just going to destroy the entire room. First of all, it's going to destroy itself, but it's also going to destroy us in the process unless we get a handle on what's happening with Haredim. I was looking at the population density of Israel, which is already pretty high, especially when you compare it to comparable geographies that aren't just, say, city states like Hong Kong and Singapore. The projections, I believe, the population getting to where we are now, 10 million to 20 million relatively quickly, and then coupled with looking within the demographics and seeing such a Haredi population. Let me ask you what happens if we continue on our current trajectory. You wrote a blog post that said that a lot of people are comparing Israel to Hungary right now because it's a populist regime, but you said actually some kind of Jewish version of Afghanistan would be a better comparison. What is to be bleak for a second while you regard is the worst case scenario in which Israel does the opposite of everything you, Shoresh, other economists are suggesting. What could that look like within a couple of decades? The reason that most people tend to speak about Hungary and Poland and to some extent Turkey and Russia is because we're following what Harvard professor Danny Rodrick, who's a Turk originally, but he's in Turkish Jew, lives in the States for many, many years. He wrote as the populist authoritarian playbook, which has like four main steps that were followed by Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, all of these countries. These steps are, so I don't get it wrong, capture the judiciary and media. Everything that's happening here is step number one. We have a whole channel 14 in Israel devoted to one person, Netanyahu, basically this is after he's already had a newspaper created just for him. Two is identified target the enemy of the people these are the leftist elites, the privileged, so-called privileged, who are disenfranchising second Israel. Commonly, this is broken into very simplistically Ashkenazi and Mizachim. Let me tell you, my mother was born in Baghdad, so I'm not exactly a pollock here, and my wife was born in Iran. There's a lot of racism here involved in disenfranchising, actually the part that actually went and studied and made something for themselves, put that aside. The third step is to create an alternative reality through control of the public narratives. For example, what we see today in Israel, the fact that the stock market is falling while it's rising in the G7 countries, other than England, it's been rising here, it's been falling ever since the government was elected, even though we had one of the strongest economy in the post-COVID years, in terms of growth and in terms of inflation and everything is going down. So what is the reason for that is because we're all crying. We economists are complaining that the economy is going to collapse, so everybody's withdrawing their money. It's not like foreigners cannot see what we're seeing. You cited Moody's, these are professionals who see the exact same things we do, they're not saying what they say because of us. The fact that we had last week and the week before terror attacks from within and missile attacks or rocket attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, so how do you shift the blame away from yourself? It's not because the police went nuts with Ben Ville and so on in Al-Aqsa and so on, but because the previous government made a gas agreement with Lebanon on territorial water. So it's clearly not related, but you shift everything to these alternative explanations and then finally the fourth one is to concentrate power and establish a one-man rule, which is exactly the direction they're going. So when you look at this, it looks like here we're fitting the model exactly, we're going exactly the direction of Hungary, Poland and so on, except that this is Israel. And there are two things going on here that didn't occur there. One is the demographics. The demographics are taking us not in the direction of those countries because again the population group that joined the fastest, the Khalidim was six children, six and a half children per family compared to two for secular Jews, or for the supremacist Jewish parties who are now in the coalition, they have four children, over four, between four and five children per family. The demographic direction is Afghanistan. These are very, very fundamentalist religious groups who are not tolerant of anything other than their own beliefs, their own groups, very racist towards everyone else. So we're not going to be stopping at Poland and Hungary. We're going to continue that direction. However, and this is a big however, we have something else here that those other countries didn't have, which is a very strong democratic foundation, at least in part of the country. And we're going out in the streets and we're making a ruckus like no one else has. None of these countries saw anything like what we're having today in Israel. And people are coming out of their comfort zones. So many of the things we spoke about during the past three quarters of an hour and things that we've been writing about, I've been writing about in Shosh for over 25 years, we are now at a point, basically, we're at the crossroads. We need to decide, where are we going forward? Are we looking right now at what the promo is or is this already the beginning of the full feature? This is what the movies that we're going to be, our children and grandchildren are going to be seeing. My hope is that enough people now understand what the future is going to look like, just because it was brought forward, the demographics aren't there yet, but they will be one day. But because we have a prime minister on trial for corruption that nobody else would touch with a 10-foot pole, the only parties willing to make a coalition with him are the fundamentalist parties, the Khaldim and the racist parties. So we're getting a taste of what the future is going to look like, to the extent that we can harness that energy, not just to turn back what we're seeing today, but also to flip the national priorities back to something that gives us a sustainable future. I'm hopeful that that's where we're going to end up. It's not a given. Things are still in a state of flux, but this is like our second war of independence. My parents were both in the first one. They were in the Palma, they were teenagers at the time when everything looked dismal and bad and all they had was hope and look what they created that generation. Right now we are looking at a situation where the government can do whatever it wants seemingly and yet look at how the energy that it's creating created out in the streets by so many Israelis and say no, this is not, we're not willing to take, let you take away our country, take away our democracy and move us in the direction of Afghanistan. It's not going to work. We'll see how it turns out. Stay tuned. So I don't know. Let me ask you, Dan, about one aspect of economics that really affects everyone and that is the cost of living, right? It's extremely high in Israel at once. I believe was that it was something like relative to salaries, which compared to, you know, the U.S. with this cost of living we often exceed was the highest in the OECD. Not that the cost of living was the highest, but that relative, the real income was the highest. Do you think, I mean, we've seen sort of a car for grocery store coming here recently, the Catalan just opened in my neck of the woods in Jerusalem. This is all from what I can see good news, foreign competition coming into the market. What are for those who haven't sort of looked this up? The root causes of what seems like a very absurd cost of living. And what do you think can be done to reduce it further over the long term? Putting aside the issue of housing, which is a story in and of itself, but in general, there are two primary problems here. One is a major lack of competition. This is a very small country, but like an island country in a sense, we don't have any developed world countries around us. We don't really have freedom of movement anywhere outside of Israel's borders unless on a plane or a ship, which raises the cost of bringing things here in the first place, but it also creates a situation where special interest groups have the ability to influence politicians in a small country and basically limit the inflow of goods. So we are pretty notorious in that regard. There has been some loosening of it, but still we have a standards institute instead of adopting U.S. standards or European standards saying, why do we need to replicate this and create our own? We have our own. So Hyde's ketchup, who invented ketchup, is not allowed to write on its ketchup, then it's ketchup. Okay, it's a condiment. It's not a ketchup. They're not allowed to write it because that's what the standards institute of Israel decided. So there are all kinds of barriers to entry here that we are far from having removed. That's one aspect of it. Another aspect, no less important, possibly even more important, is the productivity issues that we spoke about earlier. Our inability, basically, aside from high tech, which is super productive, the rest of Israel's economy, the productivity is way, way below the OECD. I mean, think about something that's very non-high tech. If the roads are all congested, which they are, twice the congestion three times, three times the congestion of a small European country, and I have a company and I need to move stuff from point A to point B, but my drivers are all sitting in traffic jams. So I need double the drivers and double the trucks just to move the same stuff. That means the productivity just fell by half. Their costs, their wages are going to fall by half, but my costs are rising. It's very difficult for me to sell things cheaply in that regard if I'm not unable to compete. So it's a combination of factors. Then you have things that are related to religious intervention, basically. Elal, which flew seven days a week until the 1970s, now basically has to compete with other airlines, even though we're tying one of its seven legs behind its back, it can't operate on one of the seven days. 14% of its income gone. Same thing with stores and with other companies. If you shut them down, force them to shut down rather than allowing some flexibility in terms of you guys can work on these days, you guys can work on these days as long as you have rest and so on. We are intervening in very, very major aspects of production, commerce, and so on that's raising prices. That's in general. In terms of housing, that's a whole different story and it's related to what you were talking about earlier, primarily. Israel's population is growing so fast. We are the third most congested country today in the OECD, but in nine years we're going to be the most congested and in 40 years we're going to be among the top 10 most congested countries alongside Bangladesh or Wanda, all these wonderful places that nobody really wants to live. But that's the kind of fertility rates that we have. We have third world fertility rates and again, these people are not receiving a first world education. It's just going to pull us down in terms of congestion, in terms of everything else. You're going to have more congestion on the roads, more congestion in the hospitals, more congestion in the classrooms, and so on and so on and so on. It's certainly for housing. A country that's the size of New Jersey where half is desert anyways or military training areas, you're very limited in where you can live. Talking about fertility in Israel is still a taboo subject and until we face that deal with it on, we're looking at a situation where housing prices have only one direction that they can go, which is that. To wrap up, Dan, if you were asked three policy recommendations that you think could be implemented in the socioeconomic area to charge a brighter future for Israel than becoming a Jewish Afghanistan, what would those three recommendations be? Two actually are not even in the socioeconomic realm, but they're necessary for doing the third one, which is first, we need to change your system of government. It's totally dysfunctional. We have a situation where regardless of who's the prime minister, the ministers that head the most important ministries, their objective function isn't to help the prime minister succeed, but to replace them. That doesn't work. That's A. B, we have no checks and balances here between the executive and the legislative right now, they're trying to get rid of the checks and balances with the judicial too, so that the executive controls. We need a system of government that A, the executive can actually work, but B, you have checks and balances with the other two branches of government. That's fundamentally important, where the box stops at the minister and the prime minister or president or whatever you want to call them, and these are people who actually understand something about the field of their cabinet ministry. That's number one. Number two is a constitution, basically to set these things in stone, and so it'll be more difficult for the next government after the next election to throw all this out and return us back to where we were. These two things are important, but all they'll do is buy us time given the demography, but that time is important for the third and possibly most important step, which is overhauling our education system. From the top down, everything, we need to completely upgrade our core curriculum for all of the children in Israel. Like I said, we're at the bottom of the developed world, that's even without including the Haridim. Clearly, we need to raise the standards so that the primary schools are going to be much better, and then the high schools are going to be able to teach at higher levels, and we can have more research universities rather than just non-research colleges and so on. Fundamental, that's the content aspect. Then you have the teacher issue. How do we choose, train, compensate teachers? We need to flip that on its head. Right now, while we have some teachers who are teachers who could do anything in any walk of life and are doing it out of conviction and a set submission, they're the exceptions to the rule. The rule is that our teachers have the lowest level of knowledge and math and reading than the teachers in any of the other developed world countries. How do we expect them basically to bring up our kids to the levels that we need? There's the issue of teachers, and third is the way that the system is run. It has today, by far, it surpassed the defense ministry as the highest budget item in the budget, but it's like throwing money into the sea. We're not getting anything out of it except a huge waste. Measurement and evaluation is like beyond these guys. They've been giving matriculation for dozens of years, but they're not calibrated. There's no way to know. Are we improving? Are we failing? What is the direction? You couldn't run a grocery store the way that the biggest budget item in Israel is being handled. It needs to be fixed. If we do that, let's put it this way, if we don't do that, then the trajectory that we're on will continue eventually. The demographics will just continue and we'll reach the place where Israel will collapse. But if we do fix it, then we're talking about a whole different Israel. In Israel, where clearly it's not just high-tech, everything is going to be at much higher productivity levels. It will lower living costs. It will change everything that we see here. But if we don't, just going back to the punchline here, if half the kids in Israel today are getting a third-world education, they belong to the fastest-growing parts of the population. When they grow up, if we don't change that, they will only be able to support a third-world economy. A third-world economy can't support a first-world healthcare sector, welfare system, but also not a first-world army. Without a first-world army in this neck of the woods, there will be no Israel. It's an existential issue. This is something that is not a luxury that we can, maybe we can deal with it or not. If we don't deal with it while we still can, which is right now, apparently our last chance, then there are going to be major issues that our children and grandchildren are going to face. Dan, thank you so much information across so many different domains and a lot of food for thought there for people interested in the, I would say the neglected discussion about literally everything regarding socioeconomics in Israel, because as I said at the very start of our conversation, one of my pet peeves is that I don't know how many elections there have been since I moved here eight years ago, probably too many, but I don't recall a single one in which there was really, this was a core part of a party's manifesto was taking cohesive stances on all these very, very key issues, as you just said, not just for creating a better equal of fairer Israel, but also ultimately for really tied to the very survival of Israel. So Dan, if people want to keep on top of you, I mentioned your five-part Times of Israel series, The Shorosh Institution, whose graph gallery I will put a link to in the description because for other people of strange inclinations who enjoy pouring over lots and lots of graphs, I think it's an amazing collection you have up there. Where else can people find out about your work, Dan? There's also in the Shorosh website in general, there's also a publication section. So people actually want to read explanations, what's underlying the graphs and the pictures. There are the studies that we do there. All of that material is there. There are videos and video clips of talks and so on. So there's a lot of information there and it's widely available, freely available and everything that we do is in both English and Hebrew. So there's no excuses for people not to get into it. We are trying to be a resource for anyone who cares deeply about the direction that Israel's headed. It's why we created Shorosh to affect the public discourse so that we will move from the superficial discourse to basically what are the root issues? What are the things that we need to deal with while we still can? Great. Dan, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure speaking to you. Likewise. Thank you for having me.


It's time to hear about Dharavi and we have two presentations on Dharavi this afternoon. The first from Mukesh Mehta, who is chairman of MM Consultants. Please. So please turn off your mobile phones and blackboards. Mr. Chairman, Co-Chairman, fellow panelists, ladies and gentlemen, it's truly an honor and a privilege for me to be here today and in some ways I feel that describing or demonstrating what the Dharavi project is all about is somewhat like a bottle of fine wine. Ten minutes is simply not enough to cover all the, absorb all the complexities. I'll try my best. I'm involved with the Dharavi project for the last ten years.  For the last four and a half years, I'm involved with the government of Maharashtra on this project and at that time it was perceived that the project will take off in six months after we started. And it's four and a half years and now we are just about to take it off. And that's because the government has been very, very sensitive to the fact that all the stakeholders should be, should be interacted with and we had to be very sensitive to their needs. And that's what we have been doing for the last four and a half years. My very first office, I'm sorry, before these ten years, I used to build expensive custom homes in Long Island, New York. And after having come here, I started working on the Dharavi project, which is the other end of the spectrum. So my son thinks I'm very versatile and my wife thinks I'm very confused. And I'm going to do my best not to confuse you all. In order to understand Dharavi, I and the project about ten years ago, I set up my very first office in Dharavi for about six months because I did not, about ten years ago, I had no understanding about poverty, about the way slum dwellers lived, et cetera. And if I was going to invest in the project and if I was going to be a developer there, I needed to be sure that I was fully conversant with the local ethos. And amongst the things that I saw in those six months changed my mindset quite a bit. So originally where I had come there as a developer to try to exploit, to try to cash in on every real estate opportunity available, I found there people who are extremely hard working, starting their days from as early as five or six in the morning, ending their days 11, 12, whatever, and still just barely making their sort of livelihood. And I found that these were very hard working, very honest, very decent people. And they simply deserved better. The sad part is that though they're called encroachers, they themselves are in fact paying for the abode that they have and subhuman abode for that matter. And at some point, I related them to myself. I realized that they're not very different from my father. My father came from a very small village in Gujarat and he lived in a very small room in a chawl, as they call in India, in Ghatkopar. Luckily for me, before I was born, he had made his fortune and he had moved into a huge mansion with tennis courts, et cetera, so I had really not understood what poverty was all about. But then I saw this bunch of people that I was dealing with who were in Mumbai having broken their shackles from the villages come here, aspire for better lives. And having spent 10 years in the US, I started comparing them not very differently from the migrant population that the US has. And I started telling myself that look at the way developed countries can really develop human resources. Look at the way a villager from Vietnam or a villager from India or Pakistan or Sri Lanka can go to US or UK or Canada or so many other developed countries and they can over a period of time integrate with the mainstream. And what do they do that can make people integrate with the mainstream? And essentially the buzz word that architects, urban designers use is sustainability, sustainability, sustainability all the time. Very frankly I've used that word but I had no understanding of it till I got into Dharavi. And I started evaluating what that sustainability would mean for the people of Dharavi. Five minutes already over. Gosh. All right, I'm going to just rush through this. One bottle of wine. This is some of the pictures of Dharavi. Please. I'm not...


Welcome folks once again to problem solving session on quadratic equations. Now in this video we are going to understand how to solve a quadratic equation by Sridharacharya's rule or which is also called quadratic formula. So let's recap what Sridharacharya's rule said and we will just you know use the formula instead of going through the steps over there. So for how did we arrive at Sridharacharya's formula you can you know watch the previous video and you can understand it from there. So let's solve this quadratic equation. So Sridharacharya formula says that if you have an equation ax square plus bx plus c equals zero where a is not equal to zero and a, b, c are real numbers then the solution is given by x is equal to minus b plus root d by 2a and another another solution is x is equal to minus b minus root d upon 2a where d is equal to b square minus 4ac okay. We will talk about the nature of roots and other things in a later session. So you know without going into that let us first try and see how do we apply this formula. So now it's very clear that in this given equation a is 3, b is 2 root 5 and c is minus 5. So what's the value of d? d will be b square minus 4 times ac is equal to 2 root 5 squared. So it is 2 root 5 squared and minus 4 times a, a is how much? 3 times c, c is minus 5. So hence what will be the value like 2, 4, 5s are 20 and then it is plus 12, 5s are 60 so hence it is 80 is it? So the value of d is 80. So now let us find out the solution. So x is equal to first minus b plus root of b upon twice of a so this will be nothing but minus of b so minus 2 root 5 and then plus root of 80 upon 2a so 2a in 2 is 2 into 3, 6 right. So hence it is nothing but minus 2 root 5 and guys we can you know solve root 80, root 80 is nothing but 16 times 5 right divided by 6 which is nothing but minus 2 root 5 and root 80 can be now written as 4 root 5y, 4 square is 16, 16 times 5, 80. So I am not getting to how will it arrive at this you, you guys would be knowing it by now right. So this is the simplification hence it will be nothing but 2 root 5 by 6 hence nothing but root 5 upon 3. So this would be the first solution. What about the other solution? So simply you know what to change in the formula so minus b now last time we took plus this time will take minus by 2a. So hence minus 2 root 5 and minus root 80 upon 6 which is nothing but minus 2 root 5 minus 4 root 5 divided by 6 which is equal to minus 6 root 5 upon 6 hence minus root 5 so we got this as the solution. So we got two solutions minus root 5 and root 5 by 3 correct you can check it check whether the solutions are correct or not by deploying these values back into the equation for example let's check whether the equation whether we have solved it correctly or not so equation is 3x square plus 2 root 5x minus 5 so let us check here and we had got one solution x is equal x is equal to let's say minus root 5 let's check for this whether x equals to minus root 5 is the solution. So deploy you know instead of x put minus 5 minus root 5 sorry so root 5 square plus 2 times root 5 times minus root 5 and minus 5 so if you calculate this is nothing but minus root 5 square is 5 so 15 and this is nothing but plus 2 times minus 5 root 5 into minus root 5 is 5 minus 5 and minus 5 which is coming out to be 0 hence our solution is correct looks like correct similarly you can deploy the other value and check whether the solution obtained is correct or not so for this the two solutions are x is equal to minus root 5 and x is equal to root 5 upon 3 so two equations you will never get more than two solution for a quadratic equation okay so this is what the solutions are


What makes your content indispensable?  So let me give you a couple of ways to think about this and I hope that as you answer these questions, it'll help you focus better and create better content to serve your audience. So number one, is your content the best? The best what? Is it the best research? Is it the best how-to content? Is it the most entertaining among your peers? Is it funny? Is it the best art? Do you bring the most passion or maybe is it best for a particular type of person whereas your peers are serving other types of people? Okay, so answer that question. What makes it the best? It doesn't have to be the best video in the world or the best book in the world, but it's the best what? Answer that question, okay, and so that you can focus your content creation efforts going forward. My example is that I aim for my content to be the best in terms of the combination of being excellent business and marketing advice, infused with a true caring for my audience and where the content is from an ethical and spiritual worldview. So I could say that my content, I aim for it to be the best authentic business and marketing training available online, the best spiritual and authentic business marketing training available online. Now that's what I aim for, but once I got clear about that, then I say, oh, I don't have to be the best business and marketing training online. That would be, I would be setting myself against competing with, you know, hundreds or thousands of other, you know, business and marketing teachers, but I can be the best in terms of bringing an authentic and spiritual worldview to it with a caring style, right? So what about you? What makes yours the best, the best what? Okay. The second great question is, who is not getting the information that they need to make the improvements they want in their life, their work, their relationship, et cetera? Okay. Who is not getting the information they need that you can therefore provide? So when I answer that question for myself, I say, oh, coaches and counselors, spiritually based businesses are not getting the business and marketing information that they need and want from a more spiritual perspective. So, ah, that's the gap that I can fill. So what about the gap that you can fill? What information is not being provided that you don't see enough out there? Maybe it's being provided by very, very few people, but it's not out there enough that you believe you can bring your own voice to that. Okay. The third question is, why would your audience long for your content? Why would your audience long for your content? How would you answer that? When I answered the question for myself, I said, my audience longs for this because they cannot find this type of spirit led business and marketing training elsewhere.  I'm kind of creating it for myself as well, right? So why would your audience long for your content? And so if you answer these three questions, it will help you focus the energy, you focus your energies on creating content that is truly indispensable for your audience. And if you'd like, I invite you to comment underneath this video with your answers to these questions. I'd love to see it myself.


So, we'll call the meeting to order 4.30, and I thought maybe we'll just do a quick roll call. I know everybody's here, but just so Joanne has it, I think everyone's here. So Megan, Dale, Chris, Bryden, Suzy, Thomas, me, Ria, Callie, and so it looks like it's great. Full house. Very quick. And Joanne mentioned there isn't any, there's no public to be heard tonight, excuse me. So, I guess I would like to start with the approval of the minutes. So, if somebody has, would make a motion. I move to approve. Great. Thank you, Chris. Is there a second? Bryden? I'm sorry. I'll second. Thank you. All in favor. Say aye please. Raise your hand. Aye. Opposed? Okay. That passes unanimously. Thank you. And I guess, this might be the shortest meeting on record. Eric, if you want to tell us about the accessions, do that next. So, we have three accessions today. The first one is another in our COVID-19 collection. This comes from the public safety department of the city and a couple of photographs from early in the days of COVID and they were actually kind of showing people what someone wearing PPE would look like. And then the one in the middle is actually a photo that the police took as a thank you to long tucky distillery. They were making hand sanitizer for the city early on. So that is the three digital photos that we're proposing from that collection. Next slide. So these are the vials. The first vials used for vaccinating people in Longmont, both from Longspeak hospital out on the east side of town and from Longmont United Hospital on Mountain View Avenue. Both of them, the Longspeak one looks a little different because they actually totally cleaned it out. Enderthing enough, Longmont United, there's a tiny amount of vaccine left inside. When I first saw it, I was a little freaked out.  So anyway, those were things that we reached out to them and they were very pleased to do that. So any questions on any of those proposed accessions? I don't have a question. I just want to make sure that everybody understands kind of what went into this. Longspeak really took the lead in trying to think about objects that would represent this moment in time. And so he deserves a lot of credit for reaching out to the hospitals to try to get this so that we, I mean, this is a historic moment and trying to understand how we document that is a little ambiguous at this time. And I just want to make sure that we give a lot of credit to Eric for understanding how we might figure this out. So everybody needs to know that. Thanks, Kim. Along that same line, Eric, do you have kind of a bucket list of things that you're thinking would be good for us to collect at this point or as we kind of go through this? So some of the things that have come up as possible, things to collect. One is related to the Cal Wood fire, since it was so close to Longmont, whether there is some debris, you know, a melted bicycle or something that the museum might want to acquire. I haven't had as much success. I again asked to put out some feelers and haven't gotten any responses. But definitely if you know of anybody who was affected who might have something like that, something we would be interested in, they'll definitely want to collect masks and some things like that. It's just we sort of feel like people are still using them. And I think really anything that relates to either the response to COVID or also any of the other events over 2020, there's really a lot that has happened in 2020. And so we are still, I think, processing a lot of that. I know Smithsonian has done a ton of collecting from protests and so forth as has history Colorado. And you know, we haven't had that level of protest in Longmont, but certainly those are areas that I think people approached us with items from any of the protests that have occurred. We would definitely consider that as well. Thank you. Okay. So is there a motion to approve the proposed accessions? I move we approve the proposed accessions as presented. Thank you, Dale. Is there a second? I have a second. Thank you, Tom. All in favor of accepting the proposed accessions as presented? Raise your hand. Very good. Thank you. All opposed. That's a unanimous vote in favor. Thank you. Cam, would you like to give the director's report, please? Sure. I'd be happy to. Again, I think you guys all got this in your packet. I think I will go over most of it tonight. But again, if you've got questions, please feel free to interrupt me. I'm looking in this direction, so you might have to say something out loud so that I can you can get my attention. So starting with the first bullet point there, you know, we've got back and forth in terms of being closed and being opened and what's what category we fall into and all of these things. So if you recall from the last time we met, we had the basically the state had created a new category that included museums that was educational institutions. And so we were able to reopen under that. And then since then, the dowels moved to orange, which in practical application didn't change that much about what we were doing because we were able to open under red under this new category, the basically what the difference is is the caps. So you easily either use a calculator for the amount of space that you have, or there's the cap. And so because of our spaces, those numbers didn't change very much at all. So so this move to orange in fact didn't do very much for the museum at all it did change staffing levels in the museum, but really other than that, it didn't change anything. So but just so you know, it moved to orange. And as far as I understand, it's still in orange. Luckily, the other thing that we have experienced and I think probably you know is that there was an expectation that we would see a rise in cases after the New Year's holiday and people getting together. And I don't think that we have seen that bump. And here we are the 20th of the month and we still haven't seen that bump. So we're still hopeful that that isn't going to happen and we'll still start seeing decline in case numbers. So that's really good for us. Go down then to the marketing membership and development portion of the report. We got an additional donation from the Stuart Family Foundation for $100,000. You may recall that we got $100,000 earlier in the year. And then I think last year we got about $80,000 after Lila had passed away. So cumulatively after Lila's death, we've received $280,000 from the Stuart Family Foundation and we're likely to receive even more from them. This was talked about early in this additional $100,000 was talked about in terms of matching some of our fundraising efforts. So the webathon that we had at the end of the year, our annual campaign, those kinds of fundraising activities, they were going to match for us. And ultimately what they ended up doing, which was really very lovely, is that in, I'm not going to remember the number off the top of my head, but we didn't bring in $100,000 and yet they gave us $100,000. So that was a very, very generous additional donation that they gave.  So you're aware that we have the Friends of the Longwood Museum. And so the $200,000 that we received from them actually lives in their bank accounts at this point. And the reason that we did it that way is that we want to be really strategic about how we realize revenue because it impacts our SCFD threshold for revenue for tier two. So putting it in the friends fund actually gives us the ability to kind of make sure that we are in a well-positioned to reach the threshold every year for tier two. So just so you know that that's where that money lives. The annual campaign was actually seriously successful this year. We brought in more money than we ever have for that annual campaign at 15,360. So far, we've received $157,000 from the SCFD tier two revenue and we still have one more distribution that we'll see in March of this year. So that represents the calendar year of distributions. So they had originally estimated $125,000 and that was based on and I know I've said this many times, but just to reiterate, that was based on a 30% reduction of the SCFD revenue that they received from taxes. And so what we're seeing is that that 30% reduction in their estimates was way low. They're seeing something more like two and a half or 3% of a reduction in the tax revenue that they're getting. And so that's why we see even now even more money than they had estimated. So at $157,000, I don't know what the final distribution will end up being because that's going to be based on actual tax revenue. But it will be significantly more than what they had estimated originally, which is very, very positive news. We also submitted an application for the Colorado Arts Relief Funds. This is state funds that were dedicated for arts institutions to try to help people who are really suffering. And the reality of that is that they are targeting with these relief funds. They are really targeting organizations that are on the verge of closing. We have been very, very lucky throughout this and that we have city support. There are a lot of nonprofit organizations and arts organizations that aren't faring so well at all. So I don't have a lot of optimism that we're going to get any money from this art relief fund, but I submitted an application. So perhaps we will see a little bit of money from that. So I'll let you know if that happens. And I'll just add my own personal opinion about this. Like this money really does need to go to organizations that are seriously at risk. And so if that's what happens, I will not be disappointed. Let's see. What else do we have? We've got the newsletter that was just released today. So many of you have probably seen that in your inbox. Again, we've got some amazing programs that we have developed in this weird moment in time. I'm forever indebted to the staff for being able to stay creative and responsive. And they continue to do online programming. I think that what we're seeing with a lot of the, you know, the vaccines and the projections about how long we're going to be in this weird moment, it just makes sense for us to continue doing online programming. And so we've done a lot of that. We are open, so well, as soon as the exhibit opens, we're open. But that really is just going to be for exhibits. It's not going to be for programming and that sort of thing. So auditorium events are going to be online and our classes and things like that will remain online. And I think that that remains prudent at this point in time. And as things open up and as people get healthy and all of that, then we'll be responsive.  I just had one quick question. I did look at that newsletter and I noticed that like the art and sip and concerts and all that kind of stuff, they're all free. And I wondered, is it just too much overhead to try to restrict it only to ticketed people? Is that one of the reasons or just well, there's a couple of different things that we've been playing with. So one specifically with art and sip, we did try to charge for that at some point and we got no registrations whatsoever. And then so we started to do, you know, like a little bit. And so we've we've played with it to see kind of where people are willing to spend money and where they aren't. And ultimately where we landed is that for a lot of those programs, what we're going to end up doing is it it'll be in house. So we aren't going to be hiring contractors for them, which means it reduces our expenses. And so the the staff will be conducting those classes. And that gives us a little bit more flexibility to be able to offer them for free. And and that's what we've, like I said, experimented with is that they the numbers are drastic in terms of people who who are signing up for them free versus paying for them. And so what we've decided is that we'll just monitor those expenses and still be able to offer some programs for our constituents. And so it's been difficult to monetize those things. Some people have been successful at it. I know Swallow Hill, for instance, is having concerts that people pay for. I think that we've tried to hit a note where we are balancing a line of being able to offer things to the community and balancing that with the expenses that we have. Great. Thank you. I just was was curious, because I know for other institutions, I've seen, you know, a mix and, you know, I know some of the things some of the presentations are not in-house, you know, I know art and sip is. But some of the other things, obviously, I assume that the museum is paying for. Right. And part of that is that we really are trying to be at least revenue neutral. And so if we are if something costs more than we're bringing in, we try to bring in sponsorship dollars. And so what we're trying to do is maintain that at least breaking even and whether that's revenue that's coming in or whether that's some kind of sponsorship, we're just trying to be as as responsible as we possibly can with those dollars. Cool. Thank you. OK. Is that anybody else have questions about that? OK. No, I was just going to say that that's what I'm finding with a lot of the Denver museums also, because we're members of pretty much all the museums in Denver, and most of them have free events if you're a member. Yeah, it's it is. It's been really difficult for us to be able to monetize the online programs. And and I think that what where we've arrived as a as a staff is that we could we could see our attendance drop off if we start to charge more or we could provide things for free and just watch our expenses. And so we've really tried to balance that so that we are able to offer programs for folks. Thanks so much, Chris, for offering that too. Let's see, where was that? Was there something else? Sorry. OK, I'll continue. Let's see, we're beginning to work on promoting some of the the events that are listed in that newsletter. So there's a lot of promotion that's going on through Facebook and community calendars and that sort of thing. We've also are finalizing some of the advertising for the upcoming Enduring Impressions exhibition that opens on January the 29th. And we're very, very excited about this show. So everybody should tune in for the virtual opening reception and come to the museum to see that exhibit. It's going to be very cool. In the Education Department. So these are some fun numbers. We've distributed 92 Discovery Day's art supply kits to families in need the week before Christmas at the food and grocery distribution sites. And we included tons of great art supplies and Discovery Day scholarship information. You may recall that the Dodge family has supplied some funds to be able to provide scholarships for folks for some of the programs that we offer. And also included in that were resources about how to get free internet, some psychological support and rental assistance. So we really tried to provide a lot of information for folks in this bizarre time that we're living through and, you know, really try to be a resource for folks in all the different sort of fingers that we do. January Discovery Day's enrollment is increasing to 55 for the month. And we've anticipated we anticipate a jump back to 80 or more in February. That's been a really, really successful program. So again, going back to what you were asking about, Eve, I think that through this, we're experimenting a little bit and we're trying to see where people are gravitating. And so Discovery Days is one of those places where we're seeing a lot of really good response. We continue to offer outreach kits through the season. The week of January 11th, we installed, de-installed Day of the Dead. So that was last week, whatever that was. So that is gone. And we're now in the process of doing the installation for the Impressionist Exhibition. We are meeting with the Innovation Center. So this was a partnership that we established now a couple of years ago. And we're continuing to work through it. Coronavirus totally threw a monkey wrench in a lot of these plans, but we are still trying to move it forward. And so there are going to be some field trips that are established through that program. And then we're also working with them on the mobile lab collaboration. And a lot of what they are working through with that project is telling hard histories. And so essentially the curriculum that they're developing for the mobile lab for the St. Brain School District is going to be really challenging stuff. But I think things that will be ways that people are the students will be able to learn about history in a really different way. And so, for instance, one of the things that we've been talking about is the Amachi internment camp. And so they're doing it in inventive ways. They're doing a graphic novel. And so being able to kind of take new methodologies and look at these difficult histories, I think, engages the students in a way that they can really kind of understand it in a visceral kind of way. So those projects are going forward a little bit slow, but we're working on it. We've also had, as you guys know, I think that we got a grant from the Colorado Historical Records Advisory Board that allowed us to do some digitizing. So Rocky Mountain Audio Visual Productions did digitized 45 videotapes from Channel Eight. And these go back to the 1980s and some of them are funny and cool and a little silly. And Eric, I don't know if you want to chime in on some of these. Yeah, we've got some 1980s. There was a brief time when Longmont had a cable news program and and the anchors are totally like out of the 80s, the big hair. And, you know, it's pretty interesting to see some of those. And then there's some others that are, you know, some great oral histories that were done in the late 80s, early 90s of people who are now and are long gone, but those are some great resources. So this is, I mean, just again, because you guys are all interested in stuff, I'll expand just a little bit. You know, digital media and preserving digital media is really a kind of a topic that's on the forefront for archivists. It changes like daily, you know, like, what's the best methodology and how do you preserve these things the best? And do you constantly change the format and so on and so forth? So Eric has done a great job in really staying on top of what's happening in the field to understand what the best sort of preservation methods are. So I give him a lot of props for not just writing the grant, but being able to get some of these things digitized for future folks. And who knows, we may turn them into another format into the future, but we're doing the best that we can to make sure that these are in a format that will be enduring, if you will. Eileen, who's the registrar at the museum, continues to make all kinds of insurance and shipping arrangements for enduring impressions. Those works of art showed up at the museum yesterday. And so she was at the collector's apartment collecting those things. And so they are on site and being hung on the walls as we speak, basically. We've also, as Eric already mentioned, we've been doing some work to acquire the COVID vaccine vials. And I'm sure Eric will work on other ideas about how we collect that material culture. He also wrote a grant to get a UV light meter. And so we'll be using that to be able to monitor the lighting in our gallery. And again, just because I know you guys are all interested in this, that's a really important thing for museums, because light can damage artwork, and especially artwork that works on paper. And so having this light meter helps us a lot to try to understand the amount of light that we are able to expose different works of art to or different archival materials to so that we are doing the best that we can to preserve those things. So this light meter is actually a really good tool for that. In terms of our exhibitions, we've been doing a lot of different things. One of the things that the Exhibition Department has done recently is that with some upgrades that have happened over at the Civic Center, we have reframed all of the city mayors of photographs and those will be installed. I think they were installed last week, if I remember correctly. And so, you know, some fun other duties as a sign happened for us. Then we're also waiting on inks. We got a new plotter for the Exhibition Department. And so we're waiting on the inks for that to arrive so that we can use that to its full potential. We they have also worked a lot with helping with the Discovery days, the Exhibition Department. I have to say, like, everybody has just pitched in on everything that we've been doing lately. So as we go through this, you'll see a lot of cross collaboration. So building those Discovery day kits and also the day of the dead kits was a lot of work. And so everybody kind of pitched in to make those things happen. Let's see, we've got the Impressionism Exhibition that's going on. There will be a catalog for that exhibition. And so we should be seeing that in the museum soon. It's going to be a beautiful publication. We're finishing up the design. There's also, in addition to the exhibition with the Impressionist work, that little portal gallery is also going to include a didactic about how to make lithographs. And so we've borrowed some pieces from the CSU printmaking department in order to be able to tell that story well. And so that's going to be in that sort of portal gallery. Well, we'll tell, you know, basically how lithographs are made. So that's going to be happening. We do, as you might expect, we have this is a relatively expensive exhibition. The value of the artwork is high. And so we're going to be contracting with Trident Security. And we've also worked with Longmont's Public Safety to be able to have a little bit extra security for this exhibition. So we're feeling really good in terms of our cameras and in terms of the coverage that we're going to have. And so we're we've got the security kind of protocols really nailed down. So we're very excited about that. The public safety has been very, very helpful with us for that. They they helped us kind of develop a protocol for the areas that were weak and what we needed to pay attention to. So they've been really helpful. And then in the spring of twenty twenty three, we've got a spot that we are considering a contemporary Native American art exhibition. So we're going to be working on that in the future. We've got a consultant that is helping us with that. And so that's probably going to be you'll see more about that coming up. In terms of auditorium and special events and rentals, that's the next section on your report there. Twenty twenty by the numbers. So this is going to give you just a brief snapshot of what happened in the auditorium this year. There were thirty seven last year. Sorry, there were thirty thirty seven programs. The twenty eight of them were virtual. There were one hundred and seventy one program participants, including performers, panelists, speakers, that sort of thing. That's a lot of people to try to manage just FYI. There were twenty five hundred plus minutes of live stream video. Forty thousand plus views, including Facebook, Longmont, public media and YouTube. And over a thousand minutes of video that was viewed. So we really did an amazing job of translating what we did in the auditorium to an online format. And I am intensely grateful for the staff that worked on that. There was it was a lot of work to kind of get ourselves up to speed. And I think they did an amazing job to be able to do that. Um, we did get through the city manager's office and the cares dollars that they received. We got some technology upgrades in the auditorium. And so you can see some of the details there in terms of video and sound. But basically what that allows us to do is that we can live stream in a much more streamlined way. We've been we have contracted with Longmont public media to be able to bring some of those things. There's a city contract that they have been able to help us live stream those things. And so basically what this allows us to do is that they don't have to bring their own equipment in that we've got this equipment already in the auditorium. And that we will be able to use that equipment forever. It's going to be a really wonderful thing to be able to have that space outfitted with that equipment. So we're we're so happy and grateful for the city manager's office to that. Some of you probably participated in the Webathon. And so that was actually a really very fun event. And we raised about sixty five sixty six hundred dollars or so. And so again, that was matched by that hundred thousand dollar donation from the Stewart Family Foundation. We did we will be doing with a virtual opening reception coming up on the twenty eighth for the Impressionist Exhibit. We're going to have our guest curators. I'm in Zalkan there. We've got a pre filmed interview with the donors, the collectors, doctors and Mr. Mohr. And so that'll be on the opening reception. And then we're going to have live piano performances with Debussy, Ravel and other Impressionist composers. So that'll be a really fun way to translate this to an online thing in a condition where it is not great to be able to bring a bunch of people into the museum. So it should be fun if you want to tune in. We don't have any rentals in January. We do have some rentals into the spring and some rental inquiries into the spring and then into the summer. So I do think that what we're seeing some movement in terms of people's willingness to be able to rent the space. So I do expect that to kind of pick up as we start to see the vaccines roll out and that sort of thing. Let's see, we do have our Friday afternoon concerts that are coming back in February, March and April. Thursday nights at the museum will be virtual and that's going to be 14 different free programs. Again, Eve, as you noted, we also have a new program that we're launching, which is called the Big Picture Climate Change Series, and that is co-presented with the City's Climate Action Task Force, along with KGNU, the Longmont Leader and the Sustainable Resilient Longmont. And so that's going to be basically a lecture series. But for this season, it's going to focus on Earth, Fire, Water, Wind. What's the other one? Wind? Air, air. There you go. So that's going to be kind of a nice thematic drop. We also have on April the 24th, the Earth Day celebration that's going to be also with Sustainable Resilient Longmont. And then the next section there with the Visitor Services Department, we were able to reopen on December the 15th, and we had 39 visitors during the 12 days that we were open in December. I think we've talked about this before, but we have seen a really big decline in terms of the people who are coming to the museum, even when we do have our doors open. But we've seen that offset a lot by the virtual programming that we've done. And so in total, I think that what we're going to end up seeing is that our attendance, if you will, is going to be right in line with what we've seen in the last couple of years, which is about 60, 65,000 people. And so for what we will see in 2020 is that most of those are virtual attendance. But it's it's been great to see that we've still been able to maintain that kind of engagement. The book sales have been amazing. So for Eric's book about the history of Longmont, which I think that you all got a copy of, we've seen a strong month, both online and in person. And then we do have curbside pickup available. So we sold a total of 736 books for the month of December. I don't know the total, total off the top of my head. Eric, do you? I think it's 736 total since the start of because we just got the books in mid-November. So. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. So we also had some grab bags available from the merchandise that we had left over from the day of the dead. And that actually was kind of a fun way to be able to get rid of the merchandise from, you know, that we wouldn't be able to store otherwise. And so there was also curbside pickup available for those. And then now we're starting to gear up for the Impressionism exhibit. So I'm hopeful that we'll be able to have some good gift shop sales for Impressionism. And then we're working on exactly what that attendance looks like. So with all of this virtual programming, we've had to sort of re-figure out how we calculate some of these things. And especially for our SCFD purposes, we're trying to capture as much data as we possibly can so that we can report that attendance. And Elizabeth is really the one who is the guru of all of that reporting in that data collection. So she's been spending a lot of time on that. And then she also has been working with Eric on the historic walks and will be offering seven tours this year instead of the usual four. And that's because of the 150th anniversary. And then also Longmont Public Media is going to record at least one of those tours. And then for the Art and Public Places program, we've got an intern that is helping to complete an interpretive walking tour, and this is going to be kind of in line with some of the other walking tours that we've developed for that online platform. And so Courtney is the intern that really put that together. And, you know, kudos to her. She now is going to be moving on to a museum studies graduate program at George Washington. Oh, she applied for George Washington and at Syracuse. So it's it's just nice to see. I mean, we host a lot of interns. So I think that it's good to see folks that go on to do their graduate work. And then I think one of our other interns was a industrial design intern, and now she's a museum studies student. So, you know, we we convert some people every once in a while to our field. So that's also very nice. The Commission, the AIPP Commission is also working on maintenance and I just identifying missing plaques. And so this has been a project that has sort of been delayed maintenance, if you will. And so they are really spending a lot of time working on identifying where we need to get some missing or replace some of those missing plaques and make sure that people know which what work is what. They are also working on a strategic plan this year. And so they've been collaborating with the Colorado creative industries to be able to get some of resources from them. And then. Sort of the the thing that always gets pushed off to the back burner the year in file cleanup. We luckily one of the benefits of having our doors closed is that we've been able to transfer our front desk staff to be able to help with some of this file maintenance, this delayed file maintenance. And so that's been one of the sort of silver linings of of moments when we have had to close our doors. So that's been a positive result of some of these weird times that we're living through. Any questions? That's the end of the report. I just have one question. It was my recollection that the maybe it was day of the dead was actually videotaped. And so people could could actually visit online. Are we going to do that for the Impressionist? I mean, I realize we probably want people to come into the building. But you know, some people may still not be comfortable or maybe it's something that's done later on. Is that in the works? Because I think that would be nice. Yeah. So I. I'm not going to remember off the top of my head when we started doing this. But I think it was at least two years ago that we contracted with the 360 videographers and we will continue to do that ongoing. And it just was fortuitous that we started doing that before the coronavirus happened, because what that does for us is it gives us a sort of 360 degree video of being able to kind of walk through that exhibition space. And so that was one of the first things we launched when the when we had to close our doors is that we could say, come experience one of our exhibitions virtually. And so we have every intention to continue doing that with all of our exhibitions. And the way that we've been doing it is that basically we record it. We record that video early in the exhibition, but we don't release that video until towards the end so that we are able to kind of bait people, if you will. Sure. Well, it'll be interesting to see. I saw online that the tickets will be timed for people who are actually coming in. So I think that will be something new. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. We've really, again, this is all Elizabeth because she is the database guru. But what we decided is, you know, prior to this exhibition, we didn't really have a need for this. We did we almost never. I'm going to go so far as to say we never were at a moment where we were going to exceed our capacity in the gallery space. With this exhibit, we think that we will. And so that's why we're implementing the time tickets. And I think that that'll just make things a little bit easier for everybody, including the front desk and our visitors. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for bringing that. Sure. I had one other quick question that had to do with we're talking about oral histories when we were talking about the digitizing of those videotapes. Is there a place in Longmont or an institution or somewhere that houses oral histories for Longmont? You know, like Carnegie Library in Boulder does. Is there something similar in Longmont? It seems like there are a lot of people whose oral histories would be really great to get before those people go away. No. Go ahead. The Historical Society did an oral history program. I'm not. It's been a long time since I was there, so I'm not sure that it's ongoing. But didn't we give those to the museum, Eric? No, they're they're still at the Historical Society. I used some of them in my book. But yeah, the actual tapes and they've been transcribed. But of course, this is all 1980s technology or it was in the 80s and 90s, wouldn't it? Yeah. One of the things that I'm starting to explore because, as Kim mentioned, there's a lot of challenges with the digital preservation and so forth. And because the Library of Congress has this great StoryCorps program that is really well known, I am hoping basically we can kind of ride that train rather than reinventing the wheel where we can work with the StoryCorps app and so forth and just have them tagged as Longmont. And then they're available to anybody anywhere rather than being locked up in Longmont. So I haven't gotten too far with that, explored a little bit with the library. They had an initiative called Strongmont Stories early in the pandemic to try and get people to do that. And I think it's gonna take a little more pushing than just putting it out there. That's my hope anyway. And Eve, I know I'm gonna lose track of time here, but probably two years ago at the Day of the Dead celebration, KGNU set up a booth at the museum where they were collecting oral histories. So I think that they probably have a repository of some kind. I don't know the scope of it, but at that event they were definitely trying to understand better some Latinx stories of Longmont. Yeah, that's cool. It's just one of those things where some of that information is just fascinating, but having it spread all over the place makes it difficult to see it. Or I mean, with what you're doing, Eric, I mean, that's perfect if it's gonna be something that will then be available like anywhere, but it sounds like some of it's been collected, but nobody's exactly sure where it is. Yeah, it's an ongoing challenge. Definitely work with some histories. Okay, cool. I do not have a report and I don't think we have any old business. Is there any new business? Something that someone would like to bring up. Would someone like to make a motion to end the meeting? I move to end the meeting. Thank you, Chris. I second. Thank you, Dale. And I also saw you were ready to go too, Tom. Thank you. All in favor, please wave your hands. Anybody opposed? Great. Well, thank you all so much for coming to the meeting. 516, we are adjourned. Thank you all and we'll see you next month. Thanks, everyone. Have a good night. Bye, everybody. It's good to see you. Bye. Good night.


Roughly how much did you have to like invest in this place? Well, here's the thing. My projections had me saving up probably like $100,000 for rainy day fund. Yeah. Turns out that rainy day fund is just what COVID is called now. So, so realistically, you know, like my plan was to put 200,000 into it and then 100,000 kind of saved up for and that's what causes restaurants to go under is they don't they don't prepare for GST payments, PST payments. They just don't prepare for things that come up. Like this breaks down, you need to repair it. And that was me being smart thinking I had all this money backed up in a way it did work out because a lot of places couldn't open up during the pandemic because they, you know, weren't prepared for what it took.