I believe that a core problem with undergraduate education, especially at research universities like Harvard, Stanford, NYU, etc, is that most teaching is done by PhDs, who by temperament, training, interests, and rewards are researchers first. So they spend most of their time and energy probing a snip of a field's cutting edge. In my view, the attributes needed to be a transformative undergraduate instructor are pretty orthogonal to that. It would seem that undergraduate education would be superior if there was a separate track for teaching faculty.

Behaviorism is sometimes criticized as encouraging unethical behavior. For example, most organizations offer rewards for increasing revenue and threat of punishment, perhaps firing if you don't "make your number."

The lack of crispness comes significantly from a societal change in what's valued: a replacement of bold individual initiative with collaboration, consensus, teamwork etc. All that team-involved decision-making often leads to tepid solutions and a slow-moving organization.

What may create even more jobs is to develop more entrepreneurs, of course, ethical ones.

Essayists write at a length that enables them, within a year, to explore a number of topics, whereas in a book, they'll likely only get to address one.

Being a good writer may result in your being nicer to more people, having a bigger positive impact.

I believe the personal essay is underrated for both writer and reader. It affords the writer great freedom: to speak personally yet invoke others' ideas, to be rational and/or emotional, to be confident or admit doubt.