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Comment by cavalcade | Hacker News Reader

A great education system is a means to an end. The end being the host country gains a great economic engine and generally happy citizens. Does Finland have this? Singapore? South Korea?

Curious not disapproving...

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So far the results have been fair. But Finland especially is somewhat prone for brain-drain. All that stuff is paid with hefty, progressive taxation which hurts the most skilled and salaried the most. Combining all the mandatory expenses, taxation etc, your wages easily end up to be less than half of what you could be gaining abroad.

Especially since the level of (tuition-free and gvment-sponsored on all levels) education, language-skills and the weather-back-home makes emigration fairly easy and tempting for most Finns. But so far the system does a pretty good job on keeping competitive. You might end up driving a smaller BMW than your neighbor, but the quality of education, health, stability etc. make it very attractive target for long-term settling down, making kids etc.

I am more familiar with Singapore and from all signs it seems they do not have the brain drain problem so they are capturing more value from the output of their great education system than Finland.

Sure about that? There is a nice graph at http://www.peoplemov.in/ . Don't know about their sources, but Finland and Singapore seem to have around the same amount of emigration/capita (6.2 - 6.3%). Granted, Finns go more to United States and wealthy Europe (probably a bit more weighted towards skilled labor moving...) than singaporeans. But I would not say those levels qualify yet for significant brain drain. From Hong Kong, the percentage is closer to 10% and S-Korea has only around ~5% of emigration.

I said Finland could be fairly prone for brain-drain if stuff would get significantly worse in the future. (Like what is happening at Greece these days.) But right now I'm pretty sure that the progress will be, though not outright good, less bad than most of the world. A safer bet, to say.

And healthy amount of emigration is good for a nation. People go abroad for a few years or decades to make money, gain experience and positive influences and then can bring 'em back home.

Seems == not sure. :) In light of this, it will be very interesting to watch Finland, Singapore and South Korea on a macro level in the coming years.

Another cool data point would be the GDP growth and citizen sentiment over the years.

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