The Author seems to be very distant from the realities of india — The truth is yes the poor — in large numbers are dying because of accumulation of wealth in concentrated points! and its a fact the education is the single most effective way to solve the problem of backwardness, poverty , mal practices , discrimination in the Indian society which is so blatantly present and is accepted right now!!!

Everytime someone makes a point which seems to be out of mainstream thinking, and that someone is in out of touch with realities of India. Seriously do you think we live in The Gold palaces right outside of Mumbai with our servants wearing gold shoes, and we just happen to make a blog to stroke our Egos??
Howsoever hard you may find it, we also are a product of the same system. We are also from middle class families, and contrary to the perception we are not elites who hate all the poor people.
Now once you stop labeling us as “heartless wealthy elites”, only then you will be able to see and understand our point. Our point is simple, you can take Rs 50 Crore in loans to teach your kid everything he needs to become a NASA Astronaut, but is it sensible considering that a NASA astronaut only makes Rs 1 lakh per month??
Its just an elaboration of the same concept, instead of explaining it with spending money to make people educated servicemen, I am explaining it with NASA astronauts. We can spent Billions of dollars in India to teach everyone to become the astronaut for the Chandrayan Mission because you want everybody to have a level playing field to become the next astronaut, but then by spending that much money you run out of all the money to spend on the actual Moon mission.
This is exactly the dilemma of Indian society. We wanna give equal opportunity to everyone in getting a good job, but then the cost we pay to give equal opportunity to everyone, we kill a lot of those good jobs.
Tomorrow our government can generate enough revenue by increasing taxes and borrow money against our future generations to turn every Engineering college into IIT, because trust me the difference between IITs and non-IITs is the funding given to them(we give more funding to IITs and have the best kids go there), but then by turning every engineering college into IIT we will be killing all the IT sector, all the Industrial sector all the Civil sector.
So my question is, is it worth paying the price to give everyone equal opportunities?
To make the playing field level, we have decimated(reduce to 1/10th) the Prize money. And then we wonder why are 10,000 talented sprint racer don’t have anything to eat, and make a bigger case to make playing field even more level.

You think education will solve all our problems, well this fetish with education is the root CAUSE of creating more than half of those problem(not the education itself, but the cost you pay for that education).

So just think about it, we take pride in producing the viewpoint which you will never get in mainstream.

The Author seems to be very distant from the realities of india — The truth is yes the poor — in large numbers are dying because of accumulation of wealth in concentrated points!  and its a fact the education is the single most effective way to solve the problem of backwardness, poverty , mal practices , discrimination in the Indian society which is so blatantly present and is accepted right now!!!

Reverse brain drain  like anything else — will have tis won merits and demerits — adn in some sense i am happy that its happening…. may eb in my hart i beleive that the mertis will outweigh the demerits.. But thinkign that India dows not need any kind of socialism now and it has grown out of it — Is a very limited — near sighted vision.  So called “reservations”  — which are getting so much focus these days  do not stem from socialism in India  but rise from political greed ……. the problem needs to be clearly identified and Socialism shoudl not be blamed for the faults of  poer/vote greedy politicians!  Author is pretty baised in his/her approach here abotu the issue

I insist on a more holistic view where anybody willing and able to work hard should be given a fair chance to compete for the job.

Your insistence is illogical tyrannical and unjust.

Every man has right to act and earn, there can be no obligation on anybody to provide work for everyone. A human has right to innovate to seek logical ways to earn honest living, he has right of self-employment. He has no right to demand employment forcibly on basis of reservations. He can get it by only means of mutually beneficial bargain.

I never say “survival of fittest” I say an employer has freedom to decide who he will employ, and his decision will be dependent on his personal thinking of making most of profits. For an employer, foreign return or not returned does not matter, what matters is the efficiency of the person he employs to deliver result and profits. He cannot be biased on race/caste/ethnicity etc, and if he acts biased, he will loose his profits and hence will be punished naturally.

Further more, in a free market, free of government intervention, unemployment is impossible until the person chooses to be unemployed voluntarily.

As for example, a Harvard MBA post graduate, may not like to work as a barber on a galli ki nukkad.

So instead of working as a barber he may choose to commit suicide, but its his personal decision.
A man should have freedom to end his life.
But the reality is, he had opportunity to work as a barber or he could have open up a beetles shop or he might have tried to work as a sweeper.
or so many jobs one can lend to others.
In free market unemployment is only in case of voluntary choice or self-employment case.

So, is there not a danger that the reverse-brain-drain is going to cause a lot of problems for the home-grown workers, and increase discontent and unhappiness for both the returning workers and those that are trying to earn their keep at home?

Obviously, and that is why I mentioned that India need to change. India should realize why actually there was brain drain and why now there is reverse brain drain, if they realize and mend their ways, they can raise their standards, otherwise it will be a doom.

I tried to answer it in the next article http://www.reasonforliberty.com/reason/china-india-and-call-for-free-market.html

I think that all the influx of ‘foreign-trained’ and hopefully competant, skilled, workers should be a good thing overall for India, as it will improve the quality of the workforce available.
This is good for businesses struggling in the economic turndown as they can be sure of a good base for recruitment (and knowing these clever people will have to put up with whatever wage is offered because they know there are not many jobs available).

However, isn’t this going to hurt the existing Indian employment pool, which I’m sure does include a lot of clever, hard-working people who deserve and want to work and earn their keep. However they will find that their skills are not in as high demand as the ‘foreign-trained’ person which is again something that is down to the employer to be clever enough to decide who is really the better employee.

I know that the author’s view is typically ‘survival of the fittest employee’ as far as only those capable of doing the best job deserve employment, but I insist on a more holistic view where anybody willing and able to work hard should be given a fair chance to compete for the job.

I am certain that in India, there still exists a ‘foreign first’ mentality where those coming back with ‘foreign-trained’ skills will be automatically regarded as better and superior to the ‘home grown’ labour in India. How do you know that employers will give a fair chance to those that lived in India, even if they are the better employee? I think this is an inherent flaw in Indian psychology and I’m not convinced this has been corrected yet.

Also, what will happen to these returning intelligentia when they have grown used to the ‘free thinking, free opportunity’ nature of the US etc and return to India and it’s highly socialist system? They’re going to get smacked in the face with the corruption in the system where nothing gets done without a bribe and achievement alone is no guarantee of success. The author has herself commented about this aspect of Indian working ethics.

So, is there not a danger that the reverse-brain-drain is going to cause a lot of problems for the home-grown workers, and increase discontent and unhappiness for both the returning workers and those that are trying to earn their keep at home?

What’s the proposal to deal with that? Is it fair to just assume that more appropriate jobs will be created to deal with all these people,  or is it just going to cause a boom in unemployment, suicides and people on benefits?

Regarding Europe:

Actually, I think that France has a very socialist government and mindset, which is prevalent in many areas including private sector, health care, agriculture and trade. They do have a very ‘fundamental’ system of believing in ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ but the reality of this (in my experience of living in southern France) seems to be that a lot of it is a surface sheen of openness.  They claim to be open and free, but the government and unions control many things, in a way that protects the worker, but effectively binds private industry into an impossible situation. Even high-street sales are state-regulated as to when they occur and sometimes what can be on sale.

It’s actually incredibly inefficient, so freedom of thought alone, does not automatically give rise to achievement and innovation though I’d say it is a necessary component.

I understand that Germany (the other Euro power house) has also quite a socialist way of working but nowhere near to the extent of France. Germany has it’s own internal divides of north-south and also east-west (from the cold war era of East and West Germany).  So, again, all that democracy doesn’t immediately produce  innovation and excellence, but it does form a good foundation for it.

I agree that the reason the US has been so successful is that it has provided the opportunity for anybody with an idea to have a chance to obtain funding in one form or another. Hence so many startups and businesses have flocked there. A lot of these ideas are outsiders / non-Americans who have found that the US has allowed them to come and work there, when they might not have had the same opportunities in their home countries.

The high quality institutions in the US are high quality because they have been allowed by the govt. to hire clever and industrious foreign people and used them to develop their capital and technology under their own banner. Hence they became high quality leaders. A company is only as good as it’s employees and working culture, otherwise it’s just another big brand name which is destined to become hollow and fail.

I think a lot of people mistakenly attribute innovation in America to only free-trade, but in reality it is ingrained in the culture here, due to the fundamental freedom of thought this society offers.

And why does the society offer fundamental freedom of thought? Is the freedom of thought sufficiently required condition for the amount of success American entrepreneurs show?
Please tell me what do you think about the society in European nations. France has a pretty “fundamental freedom of thought”, last I checked they didn’t produce anything significant remotely on the scale of America does.

So a few thousand Indians and Chinese less, is not going to make much of a difference.

I highly disagree. Americans are not genetically superior to other nations. Nor there is something in the water of America which automatically makes you the smartest. It is the smartest and the brightest people of ALL over the world who come to America and work there. The smartest of the smart Pakistan, French, Bangladeshi, Japanese, Russian or Somalian guy will come and live in America, and that’s what makes America what it is. If these people stop coming here, I am not saying America will crash down to the level of Afghanistan, but it will become no different then one of the n rich different countries out there. It would be no different than say UK, Australia, Sweden, Norway. But it would definitely not be America.

Orkut was developed by a Turkish software engineer while working for a company founded by two Europeans, but Myspace and Facebook were founded by Americans.

You are not getting the point, the reason why overall Americans are so good in terms of innovation is because they have this system of liberty and individual freedom(which they are losing one by one) which did not take place because of any religion(there are numerous countries with the same major religion as in America), nor of a cultural history(there is no culture in America like people in India brag about), nor it has to do with any race for that matter.
Canada has same geographical location, same religion, same culture, same age, similar history but Canada is not America and nowhere near it. Why? Because Canada does not have the same founding principles America enjoyed.
Orkut and Google could not have been founded in Europe or Turkey. Facebook could not have been founded in Israel(Mark Zuckerberg is Jewish). Similarly the American innovations could not have been possible without the talent America attracts from all over the world.

These institutions you are talking about they are there all over the world, but even studying in Oxford does not match studying in Harvard for most of the people because latter means being in America.