I see why you'd read it that way, but it's meant as a metaphor, not an analogy, to help elucidate that a government may take steps to try and bring about their preferred outcome of retaining people, while not bringing about what is, from their perspective, even more undesirable outcome.
It's not perfect, but neither is anything else I couls.come up with. Take the following:
- Persia would prefer many trained accountants so that PersianAccountants, the shah's preferred supplier of accounting technology, can hire cheaply from a large talent pool.
- Ambitious, trained accountants leave for the U.S. to work on DisruptiveAccounting.io, earning big bucks and disrupting the U.S. accounting sector.
- If Persia changes the kingdom's procedures and incentives, the same accountants would stay and found DisruptiveAccounting East, instead of working for PersianAccountants. This would be strictly worse for the shah than letting them leave.
The problem is, if I were to use this metaphor, people would get hung up on the difference between democracy and monarchy (preferences of one autocrat vs. that of the majority) and most Americans just straught up do not understand why anybody, much less the majority, would prefer not disrupting the accounting sector.
I.e. if they don't understand what I'm saying about Canada not liking the third option, the metaphor falls flat: they also won't see why the shah doesn't like the third option.
So I had to look for a metaphor where the obvious alternative is undesirable to most Americans. Hence piracy. The problem is that there's another reading now (the software engineers will become criminals).
Do you have a metaphor that would avoid both issues? I'd love to hear it!