The Reluctant Fundamentalist

True and terse description merits citation. So as I was reading Moshin Hamid's sophomore novel, I came across this:

It was a testament to the systematic pragmatism--call it professionalism--that underpins [the U.S.]'s success in so many fields. At Princeton, learning was imbued with an aura of creativity; at Underwood Samson [a prestigious New York finance operation], creativity was not excised--it was still present and valued--but it ceded its primacy to efficiency.