The Brain Drain Fallacy

I’ve been noticing a fair bit in the news lately about the “problem” of “Brain Drain”, that is to say the purported emigration of intelligence from a given country.

For example, there is the recent talk of the three Japanese scientists who were awarded Nobel Prizes for research conducted in US universities.

Today on the plane I noticed an English newspaper bemoaning the terrible problem of Brain Drain, with approximately 1/3 of the country’s academics saying that they will emigrate.

I daresay that other countries are complaining in a similar vein. Ignoring the obvious possibility that a country will receive as much expertise from abroad as it will send out into the wider world, I say this is still faulty reasoning to consider it a bad thing overall.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the age of the Global Village. We do not live in the time of Feudal arrangements, city states, or the like. Frankly, these days we can even relatively comfortably do business with a country with which we are at war.

The European Union is constantly shifting slowly yet inexorably towards being a “Superstate”, and many countries in the vicinity, some not even technically in Europe, are clambering to join it.

As I type this, I’m on a plane from Manchester to Philadelphia (where I will change and head for Florida) to attend an international conference geared towards - amongst other things - further improving the connections between cryonicists who might not already be in touch. I do not have a copy of the full attendance list yet, but I know of people coming from at least the US, the UK, Russia, Norway, the Netherlands, and Poland. I expect there to be a lot of other countries represented too, but these are the ones I’m aware of already just by word of mouth.

While many present will not be scientists, technical experts, or even actively involved already in the general furtherance of the field of cryonics, very many will be, and part of the purpose is to make more headway into sharing that information as freely and widely as possible throughout all those involved. This is effectively an “open source” approach to information, and it’s for the good of all involved, no matter whether one is more of a debtor or creditor when it comes to information sharing. The point is that the more people in general know about the field, the more the field will tend to advance for all of us, because people aren’t having to double up on research.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the real world, not Sid Meyer’s “Civilization”, wherein different nations must fight for intellectual supremacy over the others. It does not matter that research is conducted in one country or another; what matters is that it is conducted! Therefore people should feel entirely free to shift about geographically to wherever is best suited for this.

I find it bizarre that in this time of unprecedented Information and Communication Technology, many supposedly intelligent people still need to get out of the Dark Ages.

The world is getting smaller by the minute (don’t worry, no global warming jokes); why confine (and thus stifle) research and development?