“..the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional studies is where his or her very strength may lie. America’s primary export, it appears, is trial-and-error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way. The American system of trial and error produces doers: Black Swan-hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, with a tolerance for a certain class of risk-taking and for making plenty of small errors on the road to success or knowledge.

..we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. Neither the followers of Adam Smith nor those of Karl Marx seem to be conscious of the prevalence and effect of wild randomness.

Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas—that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation. By exporting jobs, the U.S. has outsourced the less scalable and more linear components of production, assigning them to the citizens of more mathematical and culturally rigid states, who are happy to be paid by the hour to work on other people’s ideas.