Religious commitment, pride, a work ethic, and having many kids makes sense for families struggling against poverty, while families seeking comfort and happiness from their wealth prefer leisure, health, ecology, sexual freedom, and tolerance. Poor communities struggling against outsiders want solidarity and (they think) central authority, with each family carrying its own load, even if no one is happy. Rich but still competing communities attend more to politics, achievement, determination, and thrift.

Rich communities achieve more when divorce and abortion limit the harm of volatile families, while poor communities can’t afford such breakups. Poor competing communities can’t afford arbitrary cultural barriers to getting cash or tech, but such arbitrary restrictions hurt a family less if its neighbors are similarly restricted.

These sound post-hoc to me. You could make equally good arguments in the opposite direction. Poor communities can’t afford the drain of bad marriages, or of unwanted pregnancies. Pride, a work ethic, faith in God, and having many children all naturally go along with being rich.

This is survey data. We know from other studies that the results of a survey are often sensitive to the exact wording of the questions. I notice that countries with related languages seem to be clustered on the map. I have no idea how you would separate the effects of translating the questions from the effects of different cultural values (without limiting the survey to speakers of a single language, which would introduce distortions of its own).

Well, it’s not that odd; Israel is essentially a Western nation that happens to be displaced geographically. It might as well be European.

There may be values resembling Western countries, but that is a posteriori for this study. Half the Jews come from or have ancestors who came Muslim countries, about 1/5 came recently from Russia, some of the remainder have Ultra-Orthodox views that are not “protestant”, liberal or “Western,” and 1/5 of the total are Arab and non-Jewish.

If I had to classify those into a few groups, I’d say the most fundamental split in the modern world was probably that between DNA-maximisation and meme maximisation.