There’s an interesting article in the May issue of Reason titled “The End of Power“:
Insurgents, fringe political parties, innovative start-ups, hackers, loosely organized activists, upstart citizen media outlets, leaderless young people in city squares, and charismatic individuals who seem to have “come from nowhere” are shaking up the old order. These are the micropowers: small, unknown, or once-negligible actors who have found ways to undermine, fence in, or thwart the megaplayers. Navies and police forces, television networks, traditional political parties, large banks—the large bureaucratic organizations that previously controlled their fields—are seeing their authority undermined.
Micropowers should be aberrations. Because they lack scale, coordination, resources, and a pre-existing reputation, they should not even make it into the game, or at least they should be quickly squashed or absorbed by a dominant rival. But the reverse is increasingly true: The micropowers are beating the megaplayers.
Sometimes, this is a good thing. But there can be bad side effects. Sometimes what is good for one country is bad for another:
A newer form of mobility is also reshaping the landscape of power: brain circulation. Poor nations tend to lose many of their skilled and better-educated citizens to richer countries, which attract them with visions of a better life. This well-known “brain drain” deprives nations of nurses, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who are expensive to train. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of these professionals have been returning to their countries of origin and upending business as usual in industries, universities, the media, and politics.
So, if we get the best and the brightest (and now more than ever we desperately need them) other countries will lose the best and the brightest, as there are only so many of them to go around.
Nothing fair about it. We desperately need the better-educated from around the world, because we aren’t producing enough of them here.
Ironically, we (meaning the United States) were once a micropower that beat a megaplayer.