International professional standards

At dinner last night Guy -- who's a PoliSci prof in Texas -- was telling me that he's been teaching courses in Brazil each year. Moreover, he told me that graduate education globally has increasingly been moving towards happening in English everywhere -- including France of all places.

It's kind of a weird thought and a little sad, though it does raise general interoperability amongst scholars and speeds idea exchange -- idea liquidity, as I'm sometimes inclined to call it.

It reminded me of an idea I had had at a dinner last Saturday, namely that there needs to be much more work towards standardization of professional education globally. It is tragic that we have doctors and engineers from places like Afghanistan and Nigeria who come to the US and have to drive cars. I understand perfectly well that we have more resources and technology that allow us to develop human capital at a more rarefied and granular level, but it's hard to believe that a doctor from someplace in the developing world couldn't be fast-tracked towards a Nurse Practitioner or Physician's Assistant designation if there was more work being done to globalize training and accreditation. Sure they'd need training once here, and yes that would take funding.

It seems like there are two main impediments: 

1. the "license raj" (to quote The Economist), in which professions ringfence their ability to charge premium fees by creating barriers to entry 
2. the general anti-globalist mindset which inveighs against global standards.

Both of these are bad in the end. We will never have perfect global accreditation of professionals. But we could move in the direction of some sort of Pareto-like mindset where we try to have all professionals in given fields learn similar basics and then recognize the fact that they have done so.