"Brain Drain" vs "Net Migration"

"Brain Drain" is a plague of a political catch phrase. It leads to ill conceived public policy resulting in wasted efforts without incremental improvement.

The problem with "Brain Drain" is that it is very expensive to educate someone. This costs both private resources as we are reminded every month when we write our student loan checks as well as public funds that subsidized what we outlayed out of pocket. All of this comes with the eventual price that an individual becomes more mobile with more education. Therefore, the more that Wisconsin spends on educating people, the more likely they are to be able to take advantage of opportunities outside of Wisconsin, the more that the United States spends on education, the more likely they are able to take advantage of opportunities outside of our borders.

Now, there are lots of advantages that locally come from investment in education as well, undoubtedly some percentage (and probably a significant one) do stay to take advantage of local opportunities. However, programs aimed at retaining people locally after graduation from the local university, or aimed at increasing local enrollment in local public universities are misguided efforts as if any of these people become the type of high level talent that drives economic development, the same migration opportunities open up to them as well.

Rather, the focus should be on net migration of educated population, and more specifically high-level educated talent. The efforts should be made to create the employment and business opportunities for people to migrate here after being educated elsewhere to now seek their economic fortunes. These people were much cheaper to educate because their educations weren't locally subsidized and they introduce new thoughts, culture, and ideas that may not have been cultivated at Local U.

As an example Local U may be a great university, it may even have national or world renowned programs. To eliminate the "Brain Drain" from Local U grads leaving the state, the State government could spend public dollars to guaranty a job to every graduate of Local U by subsidizing companies that hire a Local U grads. However, the elite of Local U grads can already get jobs anywhere they want and State government's actions supress Elite grad's pay because the applicant pool is so deep with Local U grads.

Furthermore, State government's actions suppress the pay for non-Local U grads, decreasing the incentive for in-migration of talent educated at Far Away University. Elite grad wants to start a business to operate in the innovative way envisioned by Elite grad. However, because Elite grad's business wants the top people it can attract, it wants to hire the best from Local U's best programs and the best from Far Away U's best programs. Because Elite Grad wants the best access to the best talent, Elite Grad moves out of the state to create a new company.

Now this was a very convoluted example and a pretty extreme one at that. But my point is that efforts to maximize local population and the specific retention of all of those grads, may marginally improve educated out-migration, but harms educated in-migration. As educated in-migration is a much cheaper work force (costing fewer public subsidies), at the very least state programs shouldn't make it harder for this in-migration to happen.

I am also suggesting that rather than broad, unspecified retention programs, public dollars are better spend creating the resources for the Elite Grads of a program to create their economic development here through collaborative offices integrated with the universities such that Elite Grad is able to transition from Local U to the Local Economy. 

The Urbanophile recently (and much more articulately) expressed similar thoughts:
http://theurbanophile.blogspot.com/2009/04/detroit-out-migration-devastates.html

Michigan seems to be at the epicenter of many of these discussions, as it is sporting the trifecta of net out migration, job losses, and housing destabilization. 

However, it should be noted that Detroit had less gross out-migration last year than Chicago, but Chicago had more than enough gross in-migration to compensate for those losses and then some.

It becomes a case of chicken or the egg, do you improve conditions to attract more people, or do you attract more people to improve conditions?

While Wisconsin's diploma privilege creates a huge incentive for its grads to stay in the state, does this Draconian approach actually harm the quality and growth of the legal profession in Wisconsin because the state is saturated with lawyers from only two law schools. What is the incentive for a grad of a better law school than Marquette and Wisconsin (30 some law schools out there) to practice in Wisconsin? In theory, wages are somewhat suppressed because of the saturation of lawyers willing to stay in the state.

However, this may have the unintended (but good) effect of allowing law firms here to offer more competitive rates compared nationally, assuming that there is a suppressive effect on associate wages, partners can still make the same amount of profit on lower billable rates. Clients in turn see lower billable rates and become willing to direct their legal work here.

Along those lines, I have always thought that professional services such as lawyers, financial advising, accounting could be a growth industry for the Midwest, as they are becoming more easily practiced remotely and offer lower billable rates than on the coasts. 

Nation Becomming More "Christian", more "None"

Trinity College has released their third survey of American religion (1990, 2001). http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/

This survey is generally regarded as one of the most respected religion surveys of the US Population. The fact that this is the third time that this survey was conducted, allows for comparison of religious preference over the last 20 years.

The data in this survey matches reasonably well with the US Census estimate published in 2008.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/09s0074.pdf

Therefore, we can reasonably rely on these numbers as a relatively accurate reflection of the US religious makeup.

The general conclusions from both studies are that non-specified "Christian" - (non-denominational churches, mega-churches, "evangelical" affiliation) are increasing, even while overall percentage of all "Christain" identifiers has slightly decreased.

Also, the category of "none" (lumped atheist, agnostic, deist) has shown the strongest growth over this time period, now representing nearly 1 in 6 US adults.

We even elected a president with questionable religious affiliation, or at least that does not make it a centerpiece of his public/personal life.

The growth of these two religious affiliations has been at the expense of what I would call "traditional" protestant religions - Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal. Catholics have remained relatively the same, presumably due to an increased immigration from traditionally Catholic countries.

While typically immigrant populations tend to be more religious as a whole, the Trinity study found this to be not true for Asian immigrants. This population group showed a higher rate of answering "none" than average, additionally the US population has also seen a decline in overall Eastern Religion identification.