My friend Henry recently returned from Argentina. Along with the incredible natural beauty, he told how incredible cheap everything was since the country’s economy is terrible. “En route to be the next Venezuela,” he remarked.
But then the discussion turned to the fact that in so many developing countries, any citizen who has a lick of smarts, talent, ambition —and lets not forget luck— will make a beeline for a country where they can flourish. The so called “brain drain.”
What hadn’t occurred to me before is how this effect is made stronger and global by aspects of our modern world: freedom of movement, English as the de facto lingua franca, and The Long Peace.
Even a hundred years ago, it would have been pretty unimaginable for a talented engineer from Argentina to up and move to Berlin or New York. While it’s still difficult, today you can see the pieces fall together: Our Engineer already speaks English, on Reddit she befriends a community of roboticists in Berlin, she saves her money, a few years later she immigrates, and lands with a pre-established set of contacts and job lined up.
Is this a good or bad thing? Good for the people who can go; good for talented people to be allowed to flourish. But what of the people left behind? In a world that seems headed to have a global “Useless class“, and a frayed sense of “duty to one’s fellow man,” I worry where this is headed.
Photo: I, Luca Galuzzi [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)]
I found the argument that this has deepened divisions even within the United States pretty persuasive. I haven’t had much time for most things Trump apologists say, but this one landed.
The country has, for a long time now, been systematically giving standardized tests to high-schoolers, siphoning high scorers to the more elite schools, nearly all of which are near rich cities on the coasts.
Then after a few generations of this we remark about how backward the ‘heartland’ is.