America's Brain Drain Underway?

In Why MBAs are Going East, Business Week scares the reader with another version of Japan, Inc. taking over the world, updated 20 years, and now including such powerhouses as Vietnam. The issues it raises are important; the tone strikes me as a bit overblown.

The subtitle is Unprecedented growth, good salaries, and the ability to make an impact faster make Asia the new promised land for B-school grads.

No real argument with that here, though calling Asia's growth "unprecedented" is incorrect. Asia ia maturing. If you want super-rapid growth, you will need to take risks. Think parts of Africa, for example, or North Korea. China has the second largest economy in the world. It took the quasi-capitalist route in the 1980s. South Korea has been growing for decades. And so on.

Here's the take-home message, which this brief article ends with:

"The best and the brightest are leaving," says the Rotman School's Florida. "As a country, the U.S. has never confronted this before."

Now, Dr. Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto's business school. Why has Business Week gone to a foreign country for quotes in two parts of a brief article? Schadenfreude?

Will the U. S. suffer the equivalent of Britain's brain drain after WW II?

Without being overly dramatic, it is not difficult to predict that international arbitrage will occur, because it has been occurring for centuries. The more the U. S. raises taxes on the rich while sparing the non-rich, the more attractive lower-tax venues appear, both in after-tax dollars and psychologically.

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