Re: the "best and brightest" it's more at the undergraduate level then the PhD level. My brother has tippy-top grades in physics at one of Harvard/Yale/Princeton and legit research experience in nano-tech, and he like many of his friends in similar positions are choosing between going into industry or R&D and going into finance. The lure of $120k the first year out of school and guaranteed admission to a Harvard/Stanford/Wharton MBA is hard to compete with.
A big part of the problem is systemic. The researcher that discovers new technology gets a nice $30k bonus. The owners of the capital get the millions of dollars resulting from that invention. So if you're a bright physics student in the US, why on earth would you pursue R&D? It is far more remunerative to work for those who own the capital figuring out new ways to move money around.
There aren't jobs in academia, but there are jobs in industry. Intel, IBM, etc, hire people with physics backgrounds to work on new types of memory cells, etc.
But why would you? If you're a 1 in 100 physicist, you might make a discovery that will net your company tens of millions of dollars, but our laws are such that you won't see any of that money. Anything you invent will automatically belong to your employer. Meanwhile, even a 1 in 10 trader can stick with an investment bank long enough to bring in some $1 million/year paydays until exiting to a cushy corporate finance position.
In other words, as long as it's more profitable to play with the government's Ponzi scheme we're going to suffer brain-drain from R&D and other actual industry.
A big part of the problem is systemic. The researcher that discovers new technology gets a nice $30k bonus. The owners of the capital get the millions of dollars resulting from that invention. So if you're a bright physics student in the US, why on earth would you pursue R&D? It is far more remunerative to work for those who own the capital figuring out new ways to move money around.