US stock-market access transformed Israel’s socialist culture into individualist capitalism.

Evidence

Israel represents an extreme case of how financial markets transformed the business sector, as the country transitioned from a distinctive form of socialism as late as the 1970s to hyperentrepreneurial capitalism in the 1990s. Domestic high-tech entrepreneurs discovered that they could access global financial markets and achieve rapid growth by skipping local financial channels while amassing personal fortunes. By 2000, over 70 Israeli companies had listed on US stock markets, often legally incorporating in the United States and adopting the standard practices of Silicon Valley start-ups (Drori et al. 2013). The opportunity to go public created a new class of overnight billionaires and shifted the traditional collectivist business culture toward a more individualist orientation in which it was possible to get rich quick. — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 115

Categorization

• SEED: The Israel case is a striking illustration of how external market access alone can rebuild a national business culture — strong seed for an article on financialization as a vector of cultural transformation.
• XREF: Mirrors the reader’s prior interest in how financial infrastructure reshapes social norms and signaling (tamarisk/immorality articles); here markets rather than trees reshape culture.