[moab]

Your point reminds me of that recent New Yorker article on learning [1]. In particular, the author points out how particularly niche industries (competitive sports, theatre, orchestras) have seen significant improvements in median performance over the past few decades. However, this has been limited mostly to fields where there are a small number of potential openings and a pool of candidates significantly larger than the number of openings. One of the big questions I think about sometimes is how America can push its citizens and employees to be a little more disciplined/dedicated (ahh not exactly clear how to phrase that..) purely through economic manipulation (and not cultural impetus a la Japan).

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time

[eksith]

That was a fantastic article! Thanks for linking that. It certainly gave me a lot of food for thought.