let's get real, it's not only the juice, attractive as such an easy answer might be. okay it kind of is the juice in academia/finance, but there's also the jeets in business/politics, the mormons in intelligence/security, etc, all groups holding power through tribalism, allowing incompetency to weigh everyone down. the problem is that u.s. elites stopped giving a shit about competition at all levels in the 70's, when standardized/competency-based testing for entry into schools became increasingly cringe. they call it elite-overproduction to not be rude, but the real issue is one which incentivizes the wrong sort of talent into those limited positions of power. because the usa even as admitted by paul krugman, is more accurately described as an aristocratic plutocracy which uses politics as a way to wrestle control over business/finance, with firmly established old money at the top of everything. the incentive to propel a nation of middlemen securitizing everything is there, even as the world changes hard sciences advance into ultra-specialized niches, you have harvard mba's thinking it's securitizing higher education through loans is genius, so you end up with situations just like the ottomans, an outdated, decadent, agricultural power trying to compete with industrializing powers, or perhaps more alike what happened to the maritime republics of italy: for a century they became fat, over-centralized, and bled out fighting in the italian mainland while the ottomans built better trade routes.
Mexico