Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

■"How Africa Subsidizes U.S. Health Care: By poaching the poor world's medical workers, we're siphoning doctors from places where they are needed," op-ed by Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, 29 November 2005, p. A19.

■"For Young Armenians, a Promised Land Without Promise," by Susan Sachs, New York Times, 9 December 2005, p. A4.

At the recent Highlands Forum we both attended, the Goldman Sachs heavyweight Robert Hormats offered to me the following typology for people moving from the Gap to the Core (which I repeat here with his okay): the worst route is "have gun, will travel," the next best is "need job, will travel," then even better is "have job, will travel," and the best is "have job, don't need to travel (cause you sent the job/investment here). I thought this a brilliant little typology, although I might quibble, on the basis of these two stories, regarding the relative value ranking he offered.

For example, if "have job, will travel" is the case, what the Core may really be stealing is a crucial skill set, like those possessed by medical workers, thus "brain draining" the Gap. I mean, it's one thing to take IT workers from a place that has little IT, but it's another when you take medical workers from a place that doesn't have nearly enough of them to deal with AIDS, for example.

The "need job, will travel" route certainly represents a release valve function on an individual basis for those who feel trapped in dead-end lives, but when enough of them go, like in the case of Armenia today, you get the Gap equivalent of a dying prairie town, with all the morose social sentiment that mass departure represents. As one young Armenia woman put it, "We can fit in anywhere. The only place we can't is Armenia."

That's good for the Core, which always needs people willing to work, but that's a killer statement for the very Gap-ish Armenia. I mean, how can Armenia join the Core if its young people mostly want to leave?

NOTE: On this post TM Lutas counters with this