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Nobel Winners Illustrate Israel's "Brain Drain"
barlevg writes "Two of the three scientists sharing this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry have Israeli citizenship, with Dr. Arieh Warshel having been born and educated in Israel, yet both are based at universities in the United States. These two scientists are perhaps the highest profile examples of a growing problem in the so-called "start-up nation," which is known for its high-tech tech companies and scientific innovation, and yet which loses more researchers to emigration than any other western nation. The problem? Large salary gaps between US and Israeli institutions. As Daniel Hershkowitz, president of Bar-Ilan University put it, 'I don't see Israel being able to compete with what they offer in the United States.'"
Missiles landing in one's backyard is the other.
I'm an Israeli and I've had missiles falling near my house and that's usually not the reason.
The pay gap usually isn't either. Senior professors make $75k and above and it goes a long way in Israel.
Unfortunately, the budget of Harvard at $3.7B is higher than the budget of the entire Israeli academia and they only support 21,000 students. Tel Aviv university alone is nearly 30,000. Giving a scientist $5m for a lab is nearly impossible in Israel. That's why they don't come back after the post-doc.
But perhaps the most important of all: the US really does offer anyone a chance to earn their way solely on personal merit. And that's something very precious that's not available in many other countries where "who you know" counts for more than "what you know".
I'll disagree with you on that. There's a lot of economic and sociological literature that says that the U.S. has among the worst social mobility of any country in the world, along with the U.K. A son's income correlates more strongly with his father's income in the U.S. and U.K. than any other developed country. Excuse me for not looking up a citation, but I was particularly impressed by a few articles in Science about that.
This is in contrast, of course, to the myth that we have more opportunity and social mobility in the U.S. There are a few examples like Andrew Carnegie getting off the boat barefoot, but the typical situation is that children follow the family business.
There are many interesting reasons to perpetuate that myth. A lot of Americans like to say, "I made it on my own," but if you probe a little they say, "Yes, my father helped me out, but I made it on my own."