"Brain drain" usually refers to the way in which poor countries tend to lose their ablest citizens, who take their talents somewhere that can offer a better future--the United States, for example. The countries they leave behind are less able to address their problems, because the people who would be best at addressing them have left.
But we have our own version of the syndrome. Many of the very smartest Americans give their energy to causes that have zero, or negative, social value. The Wall Streeters who pooled and securitized mortgage loans, or who borrowed heavily in order to invest as much as possible in mortgage-backed securities, or who persuaded their friends from Harvard and Yale to give these funds the top rating, are all worthy examples. The criminal courts are full of poor people and the civil ones are crowded with litigants fighting about the value of their estranged spouse's business interests, or whether they can or can't go across the sideyard of the neighboring mansion to get their yacht to Lake Minnetonka. Et cetera. They must be really smart, else how could they have gotten the money to pay for all the billable hours that graduates of elite law schools are devoting to their trivial problems?
There is a vast professional services industry, centered on finance and law, that exists to serve the special needs of the rich. The people who work in it qualify as the best and brightest and are rich themselves--or soon will be, if they don't have any really bad habits. Meanwhile, the country has real problems that get hardly any attention. Because they don't affect rich people.
The vaunted free market does a poor job of matching the best problem-solvers to the most pressing problems.
