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The US Drops Out of the Top 10 In Innovation Ranking (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The U.S. dropped out of the top 10 in the 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index for the first time in the six years the gauge has been compiled. South Korea and Sweden retained their No. 1 and No. 2 rankings. The index scores countries using seven criteria, including research and development spending and concentration of high-tech public companies. The U.S. fell to 11th place from ninth mainly because of an eight-spot slump in the post-secondary, or tertiary, education-efficiency category, which includes the share of new science and engineering graduates in the labor force. Value-added manufacturing also declined. Improvement in the productivity score couldn't make up for the lost ground.
South Korea remained the global-innovation gold medalist for the fifth consecutive year. China moved up two spots to 19th, buoyed by its high proportion of new science and engineering graduates in the labor force and increasing number of patents by innovators such as Huawei Technologies Co. Japan, one of three Asian nations in the top 10, rose one slot to No. 6. France moved up to ninth from 11th, joining five other European economies in the top tier. Israel rounded out this group and was the only country to beat South Korea in the R&D category. South Africa and Iran moved back into the top 50; the last time both were included was 2014. Turkey was one of the biggest gainers, jumping four spots to 33rd because of improvements in tertiary efficiency, productivity and two other categories. The biggest losers were New Zealand and Ukraine, which each dropped four places. The productivity measure influenced New Zealand's shift, while Ukraine was hurt by a lower tertiary-efficiency ranking.
South Korea remained the global-innovation gold medalist for the fifth consecutive year. China moved up two spots to 19th, buoyed by its high proportion of new science and engineering graduates in the labor force and increasing number of patents by innovators such as Huawei Technologies Co. Japan, one of three Asian nations in the top 10, rose one slot to No. 6. France moved up to ninth from 11th, joining five other European economies in the top tier. Israel rounded out this group and was the only country to beat South Korea in the R&D category. South Africa and Iran moved back into the top 50; the last time both were included was 2014. Turkey was one of the biggest gainers, jumping four spots to 33rd because of improvements in tertiary efficiency, productivity and two other categories. The biggest losers were New Zealand and Ukraine, which each dropped four places. The productivity measure influenced New Zealand's shift, while Ukraine was hurt by a lower tertiary-efficiency ranking.
The Plan is working. This is what winning looks like. Coupled with the 30 percent tarriff on solar, we're going to innovate ourselves down to the bottom.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Or perhaps it shows you live under a rock with little to no knowledge of the world around you.
Personally I'm surprised the US ranked so high when lately it seems the only things they're truly innovative with is dodging taxes, bribing politicians, and suing each other. :)
>> I'm surprised the US ranked so high
Space travel. The Internet. iPhones. Commercial space travel. Quantum mechanics. Nuclear bombs. Tang. Google.
It's harder to name something innovative that DIDN'T start here than the reverse. Again, how could the methodology be so flawed as to bury the US?
That would obviously favor larger countries.
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This is exactly what happens when your culture: denigrates "experts"; relies on "faith" vs "facts" when choosing political leaders; worships reality-TV (an oxymoron if there ever was one), sports and porn above knowledge about relevant topics (quick test: name the top 3 ports players on your ${LOCAL_SPORTS_TEAM}, then name the 3 people who represent you in the US Congress. Start Jeopardy theme....), whip in a spicy sauce of economic decline and inequality destroying people's faith in capitalism and politics to fix these issues while we fixate on who kneels at afootball game and who can use which bathroom, all cheered on by plainly propaganda "news" sources (yeah, I'm looking at you Fox. Your Bret Baier fig leaf ain't big enough to hide the huge propaganda schlong that you are) and you have the Perfect Storm for a civilizational decline. One time it's really good to be an Old Fart(TM) is right about now....
we keep cutting funding to education and research. Companies don't innovate. There's not enough money on the table to make it worth while. Aside from the occasional bored aristocrat it's mostly been the government that financed innovation; usually through the public university system. But nobody wants to pay the taxes for that. Heck, we just borrowed $1.5 trillion over 10 years to finance massive tax cuts (although the cuts for the middle class expire in 10 years, we're not crazy or anything).
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Space travel
Yes, but who do you think owns patents on parts you in US use?
The Internet
The best the US can do is 80s/90s era ICs. Modern ICs drive the high bandwidth of the modern Internet. Welcome.
iPhones
You all are very good at drawing neat things, yes. Do you think engineer in the US actually put together blueprints for A10 processor?
Commercial space travel
Okay you win that one.
Quantum mechanics
That is not an innovation so much as a discovery, so perhaps your methodology is flawed. But no cares, point for the US for innovating quantum mechanics into existence.
Nuclear bombs
I think you all won that award two generations ago. But if your country wants to keep polishing trophy, sure.
Tang
Oh I see, sarcasm.
Google
That is a company. Now their AI, that is something you can loft up. Google is not the only person for AI. So innovative maybe fifteen years ago, perhaps?
Again, how could the methodology be so flawed as to bury the US?
Because you all are not innovative. You are not making things, you are outsourcing to other countries to make bits and pieces that make what you all hold to be innovative. Being third link in an chain, is not being innovative, it is just be clever in putting puzzle pieces together. Do not be a puzzle solver, be a puzzle maker.
Sweden pioneered gender reassignment surgery and has allowed people to legally change their gender since 1972. It's also second on the list.
As for "microagressions", as an old fart I don't like that word. I prefer to call it "acting like a dick". One thing years of hiring people taught me is to not hire anyone if the interview gives even a whiff of dickishness.
If I could go back in time and tell my younger self one thing to avoid doing, it would be working with all those workplace trouble makers, trying to teach them how to be better team players. Firing would be more effective sensitivity training and a lot less trouble for me.
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It may well be true that we are graduating fewer people in STEM, but, we are also right-sizing the number of people that go into STEM. If we doubled the number of engineering grads, that would just mean we would have a glut of unemployed engineers that will spend most of their lives paying off their expensive educations working at jobs that will never let them use their technical thinking skills.
So let's not pretend that if someone graduates a EE in the USA that he or she will actually ever get paid to design a circuit.
A great deal of the US's innovation is made by foreign researchers working in the US. The US used to be open about grant money. The US used to fund education and research. The US used to give green cards to the world's best and bright. We used to bring in the best people to our great Universities, and keep them here by having great opportunities after graduation.
If we shift to a society driven by anti-intellectualism and xenophobia, we can expect the world to pass us by and our prestige and leadership to fade away. Acting like a bully is not going to make us great again. Having brilliant people come to our universities then go home immediately after graduate school is not going to bring innovation to our nation. We can expect to continue or descent if we keep electing based on ignorance, populism, and isolationism.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Patents stifle innovation. So does a police state. So does disinvestment in public education. So does economic depression and the collapse of the middle class.
We still don't have a social safety net. Long term welfare dependency programs, sure, we got lots of those. But zero help for productive working people down on their luck.
I used to live near the Mayo Clinic. I know full well how often people with money come to the US for their health care - even from those 29 or 39 countries ahead of us on that list.
And no, average or median life expectancy is not a medical outcome. Years survived after a cancer diagnosis, for example, is a medical outcome. And for many forms of cancer, the US is #1 - sometimes by a decade or two. Which is why rich Canadians and rich Europeans come here for their treatments, and approximately zero rich Americans leave the country for major medical treatments.
And yes, I'm aware that a lot of minor medical procedures can be done for a tiny fraction of the cost in Mexico or India, and that a lot of upper middle class people go there to get their boob jobs and root canals.
Not that we are perfect. After 70 years of Democrat meddling, I feel pretty confident in saying that we have the worst medical billing system in the world.
See that "Preview" button?
The US had a huge advantage at the end of the second world war, because they were basically the only industrialised nation that hadn't been fighting on their own soil and had fairly limited engagement. The US lost 0.32% of its population in WWII. The UK lost 0.94%, France lost 1.44%, the USSR lost 13.7%. A lot of infrastructure in Europe was destroyed by bombing, whereas the US only lost overseas assets.
This then had a knock on effect that working in the US was very attractive to displaced researchers and engineers. Would you rather work in Poland, which had just been rolled over by the Nazi and Soviet armies who, between them, had killed around 17% of the total population and destroyed most of the infrastructure, or in the US? If you had useful skills, US universities and research labs would fly you out and relocate the surviving parts of your family. Remember that rationing didn't end in the UK until 1954 - there were shortages of a lot of staples right up until then, and if you can't even guarantee food then getting access to the latest scientific equipment is not very likely. If you were good, then the offer of tenure at a US university and comparatively unlimited funds without any problems getting equipment was very attractive.
For the next couple of decades, the US benefitted hugely from having recruited all of these people and concentrated them in places with far better support systems than anywhere else. This continued for a while, because going to the university that had the top 5 people in the world in a subject area was a big draw, but it gradually faded as the standard living elsewhere recovered and surpassed the US.
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While I agree with this sentiment overall, something I'd like to point out: you're the wealthiest country at the moment, and will remain so for another decade or so at least, China's inevitably going to bypass you on grounds of size, but in terms of per capita GDP you're going to remain on the top. This means that for commercialization purposes the US is indeed the top market for technology. However what's being discussed here is innovation, not commercialization. The medical side is a good example in a way: the US has the most commercialized medical system in the world, which means there's a lot of money to be made by selling medical tech and meds in the US. This drives the creation of products to the market, but that doesn't mean the research that goes into the solutions is solely American. Gene therapy for example is an area of huge research globally, with universities and companies in all advanced societies putting money into it. The current CRISPR/CAS9 basis for gene therapy was pioneered by 2 women, one of them being the American biochemist Jennifer Doudna working from Berkly California, and another one being the French biochemist Emmanuelle Charpantier who used to work in Sweden and now works in Germany. Similar examples can be found elsewhere in tech. You took up CPUs; the first commercially manufactured microprocessor by Intel, the Intel 4004, was designed under the lead of Frederico Faggin, an Italian. 2 indian engineers, Vinod Dham and Rajeev Chandtasekhar were part of the core team that developed the 486 chip. And so on.
I'm not trying to say you're incorrect in what you were saying about the end products of cutting edge tech often coming from American companies, that's obvious because you've got the most money which also means you're the source for most of the R & D money on the private sector. I'm just pointing out that the innovations and research that are needed to make those products possible are the result of a global effort of a multitude of scientists The vast majority of major american breakthroughs rely on people and knowledge from around the world, so they're not purely 'American' innovations in that sense.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
SpaceX is 100% domestic,
You mean that company founded by an immigrant from a Shithole country?
Yes, because that is the very definition of being an American.
Also, unlike the USA, the Russians still have the capability to send a human into space.
Big deal. Americans were driving around on the moon taking pictures and collecting souvenirs almost 50 years ago.
Exactly. 50 years ago. Not today.