Responding to gjp, Larisa wrote:

In the midst of a very intense and heated debate, I was happy and surprised to find some comic reflief! To wit: .... By the way, there is no brain drain in Ukraine.  If some 5000 scientists and engineers have emigrated from Ukraine in the past six years, one must not forget that Ukraine had no emigration whatsoever during the previous 70 years or so.  Thus, 5000 divided by 76 makes an average of about 65 per year.  For a country of 50 million, this is peanuts. Heh!  Like the square root of negative one, the above logic is totally imaginary.  :-) gjp � Larisa

To which gjp replied:

I must admit that I made the above calculation somewhat with tongue in cheek, but it was done to make a point: there is essentially no brain drain from Ukraine.  If we compare Ukraine to many other countries, the loss of engineers, scientists and other professionals is minimal and in fact quite healthy. Look what happened in Argentina during the so called "dirty war" (1976 - 1983) when about 5000 people were drugged and dropped into the Atlantic from military planes and some 10,000 people simply disappeared.  In that period, hundreds of thousands of professionals left Argentina for the U.S., Canada and many other countries.  Today many of them returned to their homeland which is living a true revival. Look at Turkey.  There are so many skilled and professional Turks in Germany that in some factories they have to shut down during Muslem holidays. Look how many Italians, Irish and Greeks there are outside their countries.  And mostly those who left were the most dynamic and educated people from those countries. Last year, there were more Poles who emigrated to the West than Ukrainians. Moreover, it is not usually the PhDs who are the most entrepreneurial and needed in Ukraine.  Engineers, PhDs etc. are good specialists and they will perform well with proper tools, instruments and capital which Ukraine presently does not have.  They don't make jobs and they rarely start new businesses.  If you read the business success stories, such as Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, etc., you will find mostly college of high school dropouts behind them.  This is the type of people that are needed in Ukraine, not PhDs. There would be many more Ukrainian professionals leaving Ukraine, if only they could speak foreign languages.  The reason why there are so many going to Israel, is because there is now a strong Russian-speaking community there, and they can get jobs speaking only Russian.  Most of these professionals and scientists are, in fact, very pro-Russian, and their leaving Ukraine may help Ukraine maintain its independence from Russia. Thus, overall, there is no significant brain drain from Ukraine and to the extent that there is, it is probably advantageous to Ukraine. gjp

And then Lubomyr Prytulak added:

The other countries that are listed above as also having a brain drain problem are economic underperformers.

The brain drain that Ukraine is suffering today is ON TOP OF decades of deporting and executing intelligentsia, as a result of which the layer of intelligence at the top is already thin.

Bill Gates and others did not find the products they sold hiding under the cabbages in their gardens � the hardware and software were produced by some very smart people even if the man at the top was more businessman than scientist or engineer.  An entrepreneur unable to rely on his own advanced education, or on the advanced education of people around him, is going to end up selling American made pop, whiskey, and cigarettes.

Saying there is no brain drain doesn't make it so.  The numbers are there, and so are the symptoms � severe economic underperformance and an almost universal deficit of competence.