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Notes -
Great point, and one which I didn’t consider. The model I was going off of was Singapore, which famously compensates its bureaucrats quite well both in terms of money and prestige. The government even pays for top students to attend elite universities in the US/UK, but with the requirement that those students come back and work in the civil service for a period of time, or else be on the hook for the tuition bill.
The opportunity cost of such elite human capital going to work for the government is probably not that huge, as measured by the impact on Singaporean gross domestic product: the cream of the crop can certainly generate much more value in the private sector, but in almost all cases, making boatloads of cash requires employment abroad and hence not contributing to Singapore’s GDP. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for FAANG to buy top-notch Singaporean Stanford/Harvard/MIT CS grads out of their tuition bonds with the government, so that they can stay and work in the US (and while it’s true that some tech giants have a presence in Singapore, it’s almost invariably an Asia sales office without any serious product/engineering work going on).
By contrast, the US has a much deeper pool of high-paying, high-prestige jobs within the country that our hypothetical elite government employment scheme would compete with/crowd out.
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