Talk:Human capital flight

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 August 2021 and 18 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Dancaraman082.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:57, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2055571.stm. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Diannaa (talk) 00:14, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Copyright problem not removed
The whole sections seem to have been taken verbatim, warts and all, from: The Future of Post-Human Migration: A Preface to a New Theory of Sameness. The copyright issue aside (it could be the other way round: the author lifted it off Wikipedia, etc.], here are the pomo concepts employed by the author:

''Dr Peter Baofu is the author of 59 new theories in 51 books (as of January 2012) which provide a visionary challenge to conventional wisdom in all fields of knowledge (i.e., the social sciences, the formal sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities), with the aim for a unified theory of everything—together with numerous visions of future history. As a polymath, he is known for his pioneering works on “cyclical-progressive migration,” “multifold history,” “reflective criminology,” “transcendent architecture,” “interactive semantics,” “transdisciplinary performing arts,” “interventive-reshaping geography,” “complex data analysis,” “creational chemistry,” “comparative-impartial literature,” “supersession computing,” “detached gambling,” “multilateral acoustics,” “metamorphic humor,” “heterodox education,” “post-human mind games,” “post-Earth geology,” “substitutive religion,” “post-cosmology,” “contrarian personality,” “post-ethics,” “multifaceted war and peace,” “post-humanity,” “critical-dialectic formal science,” “combinational organization,” “hyper-sexual body,” “law reconstruction,” “comprehensive creative thinking,” “hyper-martial body,” “multilogical learning,” “contingent urban planning,” “post-capitalism,” “selective geometry,” “post-democracy,” “contrastive advantages,” “ambivalent technology,” “authoritarian liberal democracy,” “the post-post-Cold-War era,” “post-civilization,” “transformative aesthetic experience,” “synthetic information architecture,” “contrastive mathematical logic,” “dialectic complexity,” “after-postmodernity,” “sophisticated methodological holism,” “post-human space-time,” “existential dialectics,” “unfolding unconsciousness,” “floating consciousness,” “hyper-spatial consciousness,” and other visions.'' — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zezen (talk • contribs) 07:41, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
 * It would be more helpful if you could identify specific similarities in text, rather than making a blanket accusation. Nick Cooper (talk) 11:36, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Recent changes to article, May 2016
None of the recent and extensive changes to the article have been discussed on this talk page and no attempt to reach consensus has been made. It is generally accepted that major changes to an article should be discussed on the article talk page before they are made. The Globalization and Sociology WikiProject tags have been withdrawn until the current round of premature editing has ended and a proper RfC or other method of arriving at a consensus can be conducted. Regards, Meclee (talk) 17:40, 14 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi, you're presumably talking about my edits today. For some backstory, I have edited this page regularly over some time but limited my edits to the sections on the advantages and disadvantages of human capital flight. I have mostly just edited in economics and poli sci studies as I read/discover them. I had frankly never read the rest of the article. So today, I decided to read most of it. What I found was a glaring bias against human capital flight. HCF was essentially assumed to be a clear and obvious negative for every country experiencing human capital flight. Most of these assumptions about human capital flight were either completely unsubstantiated (no source) or poorly substantiated (journalists or politicians implying that human capital flight from country X must be bad because human capital flight must always be bad). Take the top section before I edited it, for example: It assumes that there has to be a net net skill loss, that there is only a "brain drain" to emigration, and says nothing about the net gains identified by scholars for the sending countries. It is fundamentally dishonest to speak of HCF as only a negative for the sending countries. That section was typical for the rest of the article. All in all, the page was biased, incomplete and misleading.


 * As I read through the page, I (i) rephrased sentences referring to "suffering", "plagued by" and "brain drain" in regards to HCF (unless they were substantiated by research indicated that there were net negative losses to HCF for individual countries); (ii) removed all tangential material; and (ii) removed all blatantly inaccurate statements. I don't see why any of my edits would be controversial but I'm definitely prepared to discuss any specific edits. I'm sorry if I broke the rules by editing too much without seeking counsel. I wasn't aware that it was the norm, I have revamped a bunch of academic wiki articles (some of them migration-related) without having it pointed out to me before. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 18:11, 14 May 2016 (UTC)


 * @Snooganssnoogans Thank you for the reply; apologies if my message seemed a bit snappy.   Wikipedia doesn't have "rules", per se, but it does have policies and generally accepted practices.  I've just been monitoring some changes to some groups of articles and saw wide swaths of referenced text disappearing with some cryptic edit notes on this article.  One Wikipedia policy does say "be bold" and these changes certainly were bold.  I sympathize with wanting to correct POV issues but, generally, more than one POV exists for controversial subjects and we don't want to err by substituting one POV for another POV.  Human capital flight is mostly seen as "negative" by countries experiencing "brain drain" but does invoke different reactions in differing times and places.  So, if you feel you are getting a good balance of views with your edits, please do continue and thank you for your efforts.  If you could please drop a note here on the talk page when you feel you are finished, if there are any issues, they can be discussed then.  Regards, Meclee (talk) 19:25, 14 May 2016 (UTC)


 * My edits are finished. Large parts of the wiki article need fixing: it's way too long for one and contains lots of redundant statements, poorly sourced material and anecdotes, but I don't have the time to work more on the article. As for POV, my edits are supported by the academic literature cited in the advantages and disadvantages sections, so there should be no problems with POV anymore. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 19:33, 14 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the note. The article does need more work but I haven't the time now either.  Maybe this summer.  Regards, Meclee (talk) 01:22, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Dr. Bertoli's comment on this article
Dr. Bertoli has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:

"This entry is too long. The literature has evidenced that the effects of emigration on human capital at origin are heterogeneous across origin countries (Beine et al., 2008, included in the references), with more losers than winners. Docquier and Rapoport 2012 (Docquier, F., & Rapoport, H. (2012). Globalization, brain drain, and development. Journal of Economic Literature, 50(3), 681-730) would be a useful reference for the reader."

We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

We believe Dr. Bertoli has expertise on the topic of this article, since he has published relevant scholarly research:


 * Reference : Simone Bertoli & Herbert Brucker, 2008. "Extending the case for a beneficial brain drain," Working Papers - Economics wp2008_14.rdf, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa.

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 16:00, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Snooganssnoogans' revert (Nader & Collier)
User:Snooganssnoogans removed and changed a recent addition, saying "Nader is a politician, has absolutely no authority on this issue. The Collier text was not only poorly written but a poor reflection of the content."

The content was:

Ralph Nader states that the brain drain means "civil engineers, scientists, physicians, nurses, computer and communications specialists, logistical experts, architects and entrepreneurs" leaving countries that are in short supply of such people.

Paul Collier notes that current policies might be feed a vicious circle, in which situations in origin countries get worse because the educated leave, causing more people to flee.

I'd like to have some more opinions on this content. Do others also think that Nader's comments shouldn't be featured? It seems on-point and balances the abstract, economic or unrelativized/short-term gain claims a bit.

The content on Collier's comment was changed to say "''Paul Collier argues that "many poor countries have too much emigration. I do not mean that they would be better with none, but they would be better with less."''" and I don't think think that this made it better. I very much support improvements to any of my additions but I don't think this was done here. Instead imo it would better if the previous sentence would have been expanded by this one and if the wording was improved if it's really poorly written (no idea if it is). I mainly paraphrased these 2 parts of the article and don't think that the sentence poorly reflected the article's content:

Even what looks like a brain drain can sometimes be beneficial. When educated people emigrate and settle in a richer country, the poorer country suffers a direct loss; but by demonstrating that the effort to acquire education can end triumphantly, it can encourage many others to pursue an education, too. The brain drain becomes a reality only if too many of the educated leave. Many on the left, for their part, don’t like to recognize that we’re taking away fairy godmothers. They prefer to believe that they’re helping poor people flee difficult situations at home. But we might be feeding a vicious circle, in which home gets worse precisely because the fairy godmothers leave.

If others also think that my sentence doesn't properly reflect the article I'd be happy if you could propose alternative ones.

--Fixuture (talk) 16:49, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Isn't Einstein a poor example of brain drain because he didn't accomplish much (compared to his previous accomplishments) in the United States? A better example would be Wernher von Braun who invented the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany and then the Saturn V rocket for the US. ImTheIP (talk) 16:59, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Disambiguation needed
I came to brain drain to learn about the history of the so-called brain drain in the sciences since the 1970s, with most popular example of mathematicians and physicists leaving the field to work in finance. More recently, in the social sciences, you see anthropologists leaving the field to work in marketing, etc. Yet, this article says nothing about this phenomenon, and only focuses on the human capital flight aspect of the term. Viriditas (talk) 20:11, 9 December 2023 (UTC)