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It's useful to have a long unbroken cultural history passing down a set of habits, norms and social institutions useful for highly complex large scale agricultu

It's useful to have a long unbroken cultural history passing down a set of habits, norms and social institutions useful for highly complex large scale agricultural/industrial society. Building cultural capital is hard. That's probably the biggest factor. There's also the possibility (I don't know of much evidence either way) of differences in mental traits, not necessarily in a less intelligent sense, but in an adapted to a particular way of life sense. Individual humans aren't fully general intelligences and some of us have more skills in some areas than others, this may also apply across people's groups that diverged in lifestyle a hundred generations ago, leading to slightly different specializations that nonethless make it slightly harder to function in an environment made for another group.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Brain drain is another huge factor. If opportunities within a country are exceptionally poor, and opportunities outside are both more remunerative and reasonably accessible, talent will flee. You see this within countries as well (generally migration from poorer / inland parts of the US toward the coasts, though housing unaffordability has somewhat put a damper on this in the past decade), but it's especially pronounced between poorer and wealthier nations of the world. This tends also to continue to depress opportunities within poorer countries: talent migrates elsewhere, institutions tend to be less capable / more corrupt, etc. It's a vicious cycle.