Which countries would benefit most from an American brain drain?

Most of our “brains” are mercenaries, who are actually a net loss to the country if you judge by anything other than the stock market. Look at what happened to SoCal! You are all welcome to our fintech/biotech/adtech/surveillance “geniuses”.

Sure. Just look at medicine, quality of life, etc. /s

Since you don’t appreciate any of the comforts of modernity, I’ll put this is framing you will understand: The killbot drone race is inevitable and not one you want America to lose.

They mythos of the genius is riding on the long coat tails of the post-worldwar research/coldwar researchers, where there were hard, cold result deadlines. Todays genius produces "papers" about how "all the low hanging fruits are gone" - as if what was archieved back then was easy because its today served in easy to diggest pedagogic pieces. Then the whole research caste is now in "optimizing tasks" that basically rearrange the economy in a ever belt tightening to exclude the average joe, instead of driving developments, that increase the overall cake for society. How to say it without hurting feelings, but nothing of value was lost...

This is a sad take.

Separate these two things out perhaps ?

The stuff that’s happening now with enshittified tech and resources being poured into that.

Everything that happened before that, which set up the infrastructure.

present tense, mercenary. present tense. contrary to what your ego says, you are not isaac newton. make your drones. kill us all with them. as you gloat, your masters point them at you.

raiding old ladies' pensions and listening in on everybody's conversations does not put you in the same game as the guy who discovered penicillin.

"are" not "were"

In those WWII days, you could make an acceptable living doing good research. You wouldn't become a billionaire, but you'd definitely make enough to support a family. Somewhere along the line, it became a winner-take-all gold-rush. That attracts the wrong sort of person: a bunch of miner 49ers who think they're Einstein because the system jammed a little bit of calculus into their heads before they grabbed their picks and shovels and headed west.

Here's an old, sad, joke:

What's the difference between a physicist and a large pizza? The pizza can feed a family of four.

Oh Hey, missed that. Yay synchronicity!