Thanks for your comments. I do agree with you that the situation is bad only from the point of view of the United States. It is certainly a benefit for other countries and perhaps it is a cycle that will get repeated many more times in the future. In the innovation business one country’s gains inevitably is another country’s loss. It is a game where the best country that offers the best opportunities wins and the US should not take for granted that intellectual supremacy is fleeting. In the 1930′s, it was mandatory for graduate students in science to be able to read either French or German because scientific innovations decades before were coming from those countries. This shifted after WW II to English for the same reason. And I will not be so surprised one day in the future that the mandatory language requirement will be Chinese or Russian.

In a global sense, I also agree with you that innovation, even military ones, in the long term benefits all of mankind, though I am sure there are many who will argue that some innovations, such as atomic energy, is a disservice. Only time will tell.

Many thanks once again and apologize for the long wait for my reply.

I am not sure I could agree with your main premise that entire process of reverse brain drain is negative. It sure is bad for United States, but it it is good for those countries which are welcoming smart people and let them innovate. If at the end there will be more good science done it is going to be positive for the humankind in its entirety.

Take my example. I graduated in a year when Soviet Union fell apart. My class was, probably, the last which got a “classical” Soviet engineering education. The higher education system and R&D in the former soviet republics mostly fell apart in the coming years. Many engineers and scientists left for United States and Europe to continue they scientific work or at least have a decent job to feed their families. In my own case I moved to US and went into computer programming, thus somewhat wasting resources invested in the engineering part of my education. It is sure a loss to a now bankrupt USSR but few will argue that staying there was the right thing to do.

If United States is at a point where it doesn’t have economic basis or political will to sustain leading edge science then let it be. I would be really worried if the innovators had no other place to go. However, if China, India, Latin America, or even Europe could offer safe, innovator friendly environment they deserve it. As long as good science and innovation is done somewhere it not a waste of talent at all.