Ethnic Indians have been outperforming Americans of European ancestry at the US national spelling bee for about a decade.  While this should be (and is) a source of pride, it is also prompting some introspection. Vinod at Sepia Mutiny points to a couple of paragraphs in WSJ item that ask whether India’s obsession with education had held the country back economically.:

When an Indian-American 13-year-old won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week–the fifth time in seven years in which a child from that ethnic group has won this stirringly absurd contest–my first reaction, naturally, was to ask why such a striking pattern of success has emerged. (Indians are 0.66% of the U.S. population.)
…For millennia, India was a land where the poorest scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for profits) that his economic policies condemned his people to two generations of stagnation.