My Improbable Graduation: From a Tiny Village in Ghana to Johns Hopkins
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Also: he was performing an important role in Ghana delivering medicines, and by migrating, now that sector has lost an important person. I wish he would go back with his newfound knowledge and help make things better in Ghana, where he is needed much more than in the US.
I don't think his domain knowledge delivering medicine in Ghana is of very high value. It is probably easily attained. That means that all the value of his going back to Ghana is provided on the basis of his education. This means that anyone with his education is a good candidate for the job.
So why ask immigrants specifically to compensate for brain drain? Why shouldn't any of the people graduating from Johns Hopkins go to Ghana and solve their healthcare? Any of them would be needed much more there than in the US.
Tying people to the country of their birth is nonsense. If it's utilitarianism we seek, let's send our infectious diseases experts over there. That's where they're needed. Not at the CDC.
They are already fluent in the local language(s), so they can be more effective right from the start. Of course that doesn't mean that others can't support them, even if they have no personal connection to the country.
Not really, it's a much better idea to have most of the experts at the CDC and simply send samples from Ghana. Then when the experts decide what to do, pay non-experts to implement it.
I disagree. It's much easier to give a person a 4-year education in something like Public Health Policy, than to give someone a 25-year education in language, culture, politics, etc. etc.
And in the end, regardless of how hard you try, if you're a foreigner trying to do that job, you will never be trusted as "one of us" by the locals.
We always seem to be so worried about people with certain "capabilities", whatever those are, not being pulled from certain areas or not getting opportunities, but... what about everyone else? There's far more of them. Isn't this just luck also?
Stories like these really make you put things into perspective. Here I am complaining about how hard my professors are in a crap university while this guy comes from the depths of poverty and works his way up through one of the best public health programs in the world. My daily problems are nothing compared to the obstacles this guy had to overcome.
Kudos to that man.
In 1974 the literacy rate in Ghana was the same as in Portugal. Things diverged. Portugal became a democracy, Ghana went through many years of dictatorship and misguided help from the west.
I remember once interviewing one person sent from the States to help the software company I was working with. His expertises was 'Network Streamlining', that turned out to be sorting out cables. If you take the expense of sending somebody from the states, versus sending from Ghana to the West for training versus the payback. We should be sending more people to the west for training rather than the other way round.
"My uncles from my father's side took all his properties, per the custom in my village in Ghana" - that looks like a serious problem and needs some analysis but I think it is a real problem.
I wish you all the best.
I don't know if it would have been cheaper to recruit them but I do know they had no chance here in America. They have hustled their way to a living but have worked 10x harder than me because I have an American citizenship and degree.
What about a similar certificate at $100 (one month revenue in Kivu) but in Kinyarwanda (for targeting the right students)?
On one hand, it's a heartwarming story of a man breaking through barriers to achieve success from desperate beginnings. Kind of an American dream story, really.
But if everyone with those qualities leaves the community, the rest of the people are helpless and will be mired in poverty forever.
It's difficult, morally, to balance the benefit gained by the guy who took the action, compared to the loss his community suffered by his departure.
In any case, I think this sort of thing is a significant reason why countries don't develop. Change always starts from a small group of changemakers - if those people all just emigrate, nothing will ever change.
Migration since the 60's has become a giant IQ-sorting system and that's having huge consequences on all sides. And this never seems to get discussed, oddly.
The author is an excellent example of this. If he had stayed in Ghana, he would have never received the education that he needs to fulfill his potential. He would have gone through his entire life, a shadow of the person that he's capable of being. Thankfully, because he was lucky enough to fall in love with an American citizen, he was able to come here and turn his life around. If he now uses even a fraction of talents and future income to help his home country, he would already make more of a difference than if he had stayed in Ghana his whole life.
That doesn't make a broader version of your argument false. Migration may very well be --- intuitively seems probable to be --- a system that makes the rich countries richer and the poor countries poorer.
Not in the US, where there is virtually nothing except family-based migration.
When I think about skill based migration, there should be a merit-based program available, point-based system implemented in Australia, Canada, and some European countries are a good option.
Looks like you have no experience with the program; I do, as I was on H1-B at one time. It is solely for the purposes of hiring people for jobs for which there are no Americans available. By definition, it's for highly skilled people.
> This visa is also a lottery.
Again, a misconception and too much reliance on the word "lottery". It is a lottery, but among all the applicants, who are (as per the paragraph above) highly skilled.
Then, there are many aspects behind IQ. Take one kid, make him drink barely clean water with parasites, feed him poorly with non iodized salt, expose him to lead poisoning, and don't provide significant stimulation from an early age and his IQ will be much lower than a kid that didn't suffer from those issues, maybe even the same kid.
Most of the 20+ points of IQ gap comes in African countries comes from those issues. The problem is that racists have used that data out of its context to substantiate a genetic basis for racism. But of course they're wrong about that. Just like they're wrong about everything involving a minimum amount of education and common sense. I strongly suggest you stop following low IQ hate-speech idiots like the alt-right.
- Proper nutrition helps IQ. Iodine consumption helps IQ.
- Poor health conditions, including presence of sub-saharan parasites, lowers IQ.
- Lead poisoning (e.g: lead-based paint and mining activities) lowers IQ.
1) Kind of self-evident, but variations among individuals is much larger than between populations, i.e. if you meet someone from a population where the IQ is lower, does not mean that person has a lower IQ.
2) A corollary of the impact of upbringing and the environment: if IQ is mostly stable/fixed at the individual level, this is not the case for a population average over time. For example Western IQ was much lower a few generations ago ("Flynn effect"). So it's possible that the populations who score lower today will catch up if their condition improves.
IQ = 100 is defined as the median IQ, and as the median moves the meaning of IQ = 100 is redefined.
15 points of IQ is defined as 1 sd. And again, as variance changes, the equivalence of IQ points changes as well.
Third world countries don't develop not because of brain drain but because of systemic corruption and protection of domestic uncompetitive/unproductive interests. The political leaders of these countries exploit their citizens as members of governments without proper controls to prevent such exploitation from happening.
The citizens of these third-world governments are victims of governments which do not serve their interests. Shifting blame onto enterprising people whose ambitions lie in their chosen profession and not in politics is guilty of blaming the victim and argues against his right of individual agency.
Here's a hypothetical question: Suppose there is a charitable foundation that identifies 100 poor, smart, hard-working young people in Ghana. Of these 100, the foundation randomly chooses 50 to receive a scholarship to immigrate to a rich country like the US or Germany and receive a university education. Ten years after they graduate, the foundation asks an independent person to make an assessment of 'contribution to Ghanaian society' for (a) each family member of each graduate; (b) each individual who did not receive the scholarship and each of his/her family members. If the result is that the estimated total contribution by group (a) is bigger than group (b), would that change your mind about emigration being a loss to the community?
It's discussed a lot. It's where the term "brain drain" comes from. Hundreds of studies have been done on the subject, many of which are linked on the wikipedia page for "human capital flight," which is the academic term for what you're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
I can't make a moral argument why he is more obligated to sacrifice himself for that country, than anyone else in the world. Being born there is a pure lottery and has very little to do with morals. If anything, the moral expectation would be on the people in many other parts of the world, who spend most of their (our) lives in relative comfort, to devote some real time and effort helping there.