““The exodus takes different forms in different countries. In Spain, many gifted young émigrés come from ordinary families without the connections to enter the Spanish elite. France exports ambitious people who can’t join the French elite because they didn’t go to a grande école. This amounts to a geographical reshuffling of elites. Amsterdam may be the future for cities like Paris and Madrid: a backwater inhabited by an increasingly impotent national elite, a delightful place for paceless mornings of coffee and newspapers.””
