There’s a curious paradox unfolding across the developed world. As societies become wealthier, more connected, and ostensibly more comfortable, their citizens grow increasingly dissatisfied with their governments. Politicians from Tokyo to Toronto lament that despite unprecedented material prosperity, approval ratings languish and trust in institutions erodes. But this isn’t really a paradox at all. It’s the natural consequence of a fundamental shift in the relationship between states and their people.
Consider what life was like a century ago in most of the world. For the average person, government was something distant and largely irrelevant to daily existence. You were born in a place, you would likely die in that place, and the quality of governance was just another immutable fact of life, like the weather or the soil quality. Moving to another country was an epic undertaking reserved for the desperate or the exceptionally ambitious. The barriers were enormous: physical distance that took weeks to traverse, language barriers that were nearly insurmountable without years of study, complete disconnection from family and community, and the loss of whatever modest economic foothold you might have established.
In that world, governments could be mediocre, corrupt, or incompetent, and citizens had little recourse beyond revolution. Loyalty to one’s country wasn’t really a choice so much as a cage you were born into. People endured because endurance was the only option.
That world is vanishing, and in some places has already disappeared entirely. The forces eroding it are well known but worth enumerating: instantaneous global communication, affordable international travel, the rise of English as a true lingua franca, internationally recognized professional credentials, remote work that severs income from physical location, and increasingly streamlined immigration pathways for skilled workers. A software engineer in Mumbai can now realistically compare her prospects in India, Canada, Germany, and Singapore, not as abstract destinations but as genuine alternatives she could pursue within months.
This transformation has turned citizenship from a prison into a marketplace. And in any marketplace, providers must compete on quality or lose their customers.The competition manifests most obviously in the scramble for top talent. Countries like Canada, Australia, and Singapore have built elaborate points-based immigration systems designed to attract exactly the kind of educated, skilled, economically productive individuals that every nation wants more of. These aren’t humanitarian programs, they’re competitive recruitment drives. The implicit message is clear: if your own country can’t provide you with safety, opportunity, and competent governance, we’d be happy to have you instead.
What’s striking is how this competitive pressure scales with development level. A poorly governed developing nation loses some of its best and brightest, which is tragic but doesn’t immediately threaten the state’s viability. But wealthy nations face a different calculus entirely. They need to attract and retain not just any workers, but specifically the highly skilled professionals who drive innovation, pay substantial taxes, and create the economic dynamism that sustains a modern economy. Lose too many of these people and the fiscal foundation starts to crack. The welfare state becomes unsustainable. Infrastructure decays. The very amenities that once made the country attractive begin to deteriorate.
This creates a ratchet effect. Once a country becomes developed and wealthy, it must maintain a certain level of governmental competence just to avoid sliding backward. The bar keeps rising because citizens are constantly making comparisons. A Danish citizen wondering whether to stay in Copenhagen or move to Amsterdam isn’t just comparing job offers. She’s comparing healthcare systems, educational quality for her children, safety, housing costs, tax rates, bureaucratic efficiency, and a dozen other factors that are all fundamentally products of governmental competence. If Denmark consistently underperforms, it doesn’t matter that it’s still better than most of the world. What matters is that Amsterdam is right there, equally accessible, and doing things better.
The most sophisticated citizens understand this dynamic and exploit it ruthlessly. High earners in the United States structure their lives to benefit from state competition, moving to Texas or Florida to escape state income taxes while perhaps maintaining legal residency in their former homes for other benefits. Within the European Union, young professionals hopscotch between cities, chasing opportunity with minimal friction. Digital nomads arbitrage cost of living against internet quality and visa policies, assembling bespoke lifestyles that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
Governments notice. They have to. Every country now watches its emigration statistics with concern, particularly the breakdown by skill and education level. Brain drain was once a problem associated with developing nations, but now even wealthy countries worry about it. When France loses engineers to Switzerland, when Britain loses finance professionals to Dubai, when Australia loses doctors to the United States, it represents not just a loss of talent but a vote of no confidence in governmental competence.
The response has been illuminating. Countries double down on the things that matter to mobile, skilled citizens. Infrastructure gets upgraded. Digital government services proliferate because educated citizens refuse to tolerate Kafka-esque bureaucracy when they know Estonia lets you do everything online. Tax systems get tweaked to remain competitive because high earners can simply leave. Immigration policies for skilled workers get streamlined because everyone wants to attract the people other countries are losing.
Even authoritarian states feel this pressure, though they respond differently. China’s efforts to lure back overseas Chinese scientists and entrepreneurs with generous packages speaks to the same dynamic. Dubai’s transformation into a low-tax haven for global professionals represents an explicit strategy to compete for human capital. Singapore’s entire national model is predicated on being so well-governed, so efficient, so attractive to skilled workers that it can overcome its tiny size and lack of natural resources.
The stakes compound because of network effects. When capable people leave, they take their social networks, their mentorship, their tacit knowledge with them. The entrepreneur who leaves doesn’t just deprive her home country of her own efforts, she deprives it of the company she would have built, the jobs she would have created, the other entrepreneurs she would have mentored. This creates accelerating divergence. Well-governed countries get even better as they attract more talent, while poorly governed ones spiral as their most capable citizens conclude that exit is easier than reform.
None of this means that patriotism is dead or that everyone is a rootless cosmopolitan. Most people still have deep attachments to place, family, culture, and language. Moving countries remains difficult and emotionally wrenching. But attachment is no longer absolute. It exists on a spectrum, and governments must now govern well enough that the benefits of staying outweigh the costs of leaving for enough people to maintain social cohesion and economic vitality.
The implications are profound and still unfolding. In the long run, this could be extraordinarily positive for humanity. If governments must compete for citizens by providing better services, better infrastructure, more sensible policies, then the natural result should be a gradual improvement in governance worldwide. The mediocre will be forced to improve or face depopulation and economic decline. Excellence will be rewarded with growth and prosperity.
But the transition may be turbulent. Countries that fail to adapt will face an exodus of their most capable citizens, creating a vicious cycle that may prove difficult to escape. The competition may also create troubling dynamics, with nations offering sweetheart deals to the wealthy while neglecting their less mobile citizens, deepening inequality. Tax competition could undermine the fiscal capacity needed to provide public goods. And there’s something unsettling about citizenship becoming purely transactional, though perhaps that’s inevitable nostalgia for a world that never really existed.
What’s certain is that we’re moving toward a world where governmental competence is no longer optional for developed nations. The era when geography was destiny is ending. The countries that thrive in the coming decades will be those that understand they must earn their citizens’ presence every day, through effective governance, smart policy, and genuine responsiveness to needs. The rest will watch their best and brightest board planes to somewhere better, carrying with them the seeds of their home country’s decline and their new country’s continued success.
The “nicer” the world becomes, the higher the bar rises. And governments that fail to clear it will find themselves presiding over emptying houses.