In talmudic tort law, remuneration for damages must in many cases be paid in high-quality land. (As in most premodern economies, payment made in kind was more common than payment in cash.) A court thus places a price on the damages and then the responsible party must transfer to the plaintiff an area of his best land of equivalent value—rather than a larger area of lower-quality land. From the standpoint of classical economics, such a requirement is nonsensical, as Shlomo Zuckier writes:

[S]ince both fields are worth the same amount of money, what is the special preference for having [the tortfeasor] pay with the smaller, higher-quality field rather than the larger, lower-quality field? The standard answer given for this question is [that this] is preferable [from the paint of view of the plaintiff]. . . . In other words, a smaller, high-quality field costing $100 is more valuable than a larger, lower quality field of the same cost. . . .

A basic problem is posed to this approach from the perspective of economics [and] the concept of efficient markets. If a $100 high-quality field is worth more than a $100 low-quality field, why do they remain at the same price? Shouldn’t the high-quality field’s greater value be reflected by a correction in the markets such that it is now worth more than $100? . . .

It may be possible to resolve [this and similar] problems on the basis of a revolution in the study of economics that took place over the past half-century. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two Israeli psychologists and scions of rabbinic dynasties, earned the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 (received by Kahneman; Tversky was deceased by that point) on the basis of their research in the 1970s on behavioral economics. . . .

Kahneman and Tversky, approaching the field of economics from their backgrounds in psychology, took a new perspective on these issues. They pointed to all sorts of irrationalities that are built into the human psyche and raised the question of their significance for economics. For example, people are loss-averse, which means that people value not losing $5 more than they value earning $5, despite the fact that from an economic perspective these things are equivalent. [Furthermore, behavioral research suggests that] loss aversion is much stronger regarding their higher-quality assets than it is regarding their lower-quality assets. Therefore, although giving up either part of a field is of equal cost to the damager’s wallet, the cost to his psyche will be greater in the first case.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.