brain drain

(noun)

The migration of educated or talented people from less- economically advanced areas to more economically advanced areas, especially to large cities or richer countries.

Related Terms

Examples of brain drain in the following topics:

  • Education and Industrialization

    • Human capital flight, more commonly referred to as the "brain drain," is the large-scale emigration of a large group of individuals with technical skills or knowledge.
    • The brain drain is often associated with de-skilling of emigrants in their country of destination, while their country of emigration experiences the draining of skilled individuals.

  • Migration

    • This migration pattern, which abandoned cities refer to as "the brain drain," occurs as young graduates seek high-paying jobs and powerful social networks.

  • Global Crime

    • It can undermine democracy, disrupt free markets, drain national assets, and inhibit the development of stable societies.

  • Global Aging

    • The people who were born during a population surge in the 1950s–1960s are beginning to reach old age, draining the country's Medicare and social security reserves as they claim their benefits.

  • Competition

    • On the negative side, competition can cause injury and loss to the organisms involved, and drain valuable resources and energy.

  • Psychological Theories of Deviance

    • In many ways, psychological theories of deviance mirror biological explanations, only with an added emphasis on brain function.
    • Whereas historical biological explanations, such as those provided by the Italian School, used biological traits from the whole body (e.g., protruding jaws, large ears) as signifiers of a biological propensity for criminal behavior, today's psychological theories of deviance use the biology of the brain (in terms of the structure of the brain, levels of neurotransmitters, and psychiatric diagnoses) to explain deviance.
    • Compared to normal controls, youth with early and adolescent onset of conduct disorder displayed reduced responses in the brain regions associated with antisocial behavior.
    • In addition, youth with conduct disorder demonstrated less responsiveness in the orbitofrontal regions of the brain during a stimulus-reinforcement and reward task.

  • Shrinking Cities and Counter-Urbanization

    • White flight contributed to the draining of cities' tax bases when middle-class people left.

  • The Rural Rebound

    • White flight contributed to the draining of cities' tax bases when middle-class people left, exacerbating urban decay caused in part by the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs as they moved into rural areas or overseas where labor was cheaper.

  • Effects of Group Size on Stability and Intimacy

    • The concept is based on studies of social animals, which have shown a correlation between the typical frontal brain capacity the members of a species has and the maximum size of the groups in which they live.
    • Like animals, the number of relationships the human brain can handle is large but not unlimited .

  • The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

    • Neurological evidence, based on EEGs, supports the idea that humans have a "social brain," meaning, there are components of the human brain that govern social interaction.
    • These parts of the brain begin developing in early childhood (the preschool years) and aid humans in understanding how other people think.