Incentives Concentrate the Mind Wonderfully

August 10, 2005

Constant Reader noticed this, and suggests the embedded principle may offer an important key to a nation's productivity and creativity.

Americans may be no more competent or educated than some others, but because the social and economic system is free to offer incentives and deliver rewards -- often rewards even greater than promised or anticipated -- it is arguable that they, and other consistently productive economies, operate consistently closer to the maximum of their training and competency.

Economists would perhaps say there is a definable cost to the effort of using what we know, of closing the gap between default performance, and full-out attention and application.