The smartest aren't uniformly distributed across the Earth.

That's true. It is possible that the smartest 5% are all here in the USA. But it is statistically unlikely that's true.

You put words in my mouth. I don't claim that the smartest are clustered in the USA.

	▲	unethical_ban 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		So your original comment was somewhat of a tangent. the point jedberg made is that it is in the interest of a country with a strong economic and academic base to welcome the smartest people from across the world, since it is unlikely that all the smartest people in the world are in the US.