Alan Greespan gave one of those speeches yesterday where he tiptoes around something important but leaves that subject alone. (The picture is from MSNBC.)

He talked about intellectual property rights. He said they're increasingly important.

But while most commentators will take this as a chance to go on-and-on about the Copyright Wars or the Patent Wars, it's far more important to think about where ideas come from -- people.

The battle is on for smart people. We have always been ahead. But we are deliberately losing ground. Years from now people will refer to this era as the American Brain Drain, and we only have a limited amount of time to reverse it before its effects become irreversible.

One key component is a decline in graduate school applications from overseas. This is very easy to correct. But increasingly Chinese students, for instance, are favoring Britain, and this is a great benefit to the British economy. (The cartoon, by Graeme Mackay, on Canadian fears of their brains leaking to the U.S., is nevertheless on-point.)

At the same time, technology careers are becoming even-more unfashionable to U.S. students. As one first-hand observer wrote to Dave Farber's list "in the years between 2000 and 2003, I saw computer science very rapidly go from being a 'good' major (one where the student saw a graduate as having a good chance of getting a decent job) to being a 'bad' major (one where the student wishes he could switch to another major because the chances of getting a good job in his field were low, and even if one could get a job, salaries were decreasing.)"

We can't treat technology knowledge as a faucet we turn on-and-off in tune with short-term economic prospects. It does not work that way. It's a long-term process that must be constantly encouraged.

Combine our failure to import brains with a continued re-patriation of educated Chinese and Indian brains, plus our failure to train our own brains, and you have the American Brain Drain.

It puts the lie to all the rosy scenarios of those who see outsourcing as good. Unless we continue to climb the greasy pole of technology progress, then we really are exporting away our future, and everything we do to protect intellectual property is only a protection for our economic rivals.