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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. :)
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).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
... we're staffing almost all of our BioTech staff in Vietnam. We have several championship winners of regional (ASEAN) computing competitions as well as the very top students in A.I. and computational theory (essential for crunching the gigantic datasets that the genomic revolution is bringing).
It is very difficult to get even these supremely qualified candidates work permits (unless we're willing to game the system like some Indian outsourcing companies) and even then it's literally a lottery. So their minds, the technology they create and benefits (and investment) that follows will stay overseas.
Maybe we'll go to Canada.
The fact that our president is an openly racist ignorant fraud doesn't help (in the first meeting with the Prime Minister with Vietnam, Trump went around to all present making fun for a few minutes of his name "Phuc". Imagine that, the "leader" of the free world acting like a third grade Beavus and Butt-Head. I understand that this has happened with other leaders who've had the misfortune of being introduced to Trump).
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.
I agree with you 100 percent. Many, if not most of the countries in the developing world have long had stances hostile to immigration similar to Trump's. A large part of what made America great was that we were open to immigration for 400 years, and each successive wave contributed qualities that we didn't really have before.
Most of these waves of immigrants were opposed by some of the old timers who felt insecure in their careers and positions on the social ladder. It's no different today, although the anti-immigration folks try to present it as being different. Human nature doesn't change very much from one generation to the next.
Space travel: Russia
iPhones: Finland (Derivative of Nokia)
Commercial space travel: Ariane/Astrium
Quantum mechanics: Germany (Einstein, 1905)
Nuclear bombs: basic knowledge was in Europe, much of the original research was conducted in Britain.
Tang: I'll give you this one. But what about Red Bull?
Google: USA.
You were saying?
Even so, many of those are in the past. Tertiary education is becoming unaffordable for many people, which will limit the future of STEM in the USA.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
What went wrong is that we legalized bribery in the '70s by equating speech with money and declaring bribes to be free speech. We then went about throwing out the antitrust regulations so that companies could stifle innovation from rivals and expanded IP rights to the point where it's difficult to do anything that doesn't infringe on somebody's property.
And if that weren't enough, we pretty much destroyed labor so that the small parties that were previously the source of most innovation mostly didn't have the money or job security to do anything interesting.
There's still innovation going on, but it's not anywhere near what it used to be or should be. And it's probably not going to get any better as long as we've got two right wing pro-corporate parties.
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.
The best the US can do is 80s/90s era ICs. Modern ICs drive the high bandwidth of the modern Internet. Welcome.
Approximately 75% of Intel's semiconductor fabrication is performed in the USA.. That includes 14nm and 10nm foundries, with a 7nm foundry planned to open in the US as well.
GlobalFoundries has a presence in the US and is pushing out 60,000 wafers a month outside of Albany, NY with process at 14, 22 and 28 nm. (that's a lot, the largest in the world are pushing about 150,000 wafers/month)
Tower Semiconductor has US foundries, although it is not a US company, dealing with some more exotic ICs for mixed signal and high performance analog. They're frequently making special purpose ASICs for telecommunications, so there's your "high bandwidth Internet" right there.
Does the US manufacture the most ICs? No way, not by a long shot, the tiny Island nation of Taiwan has the big United States beat by an order of magnitude. But the US still operates cutting edge silicon foundries, so it's premature to say "The best the US can do is 80s/90s era ICs"
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well... generally life expectancy is a pretty big medical outcome. Considering how much the US spends it's kinda sad it is somewhere around 30-something to 40-something place.
Innovations are not all patented. And not every patent is an innovation.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
Where's brand management?
Leveraging synergies?
Obesity?
Strategic reassignment of global presence?
Operational guidance of private sector management of the state?
Upward redeployment of economic value propositions with attendent infiltration to lower skilled resources?
I don't see the point of this survey.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
What I'd like to see is a list of innovations (by industry) made in the last 5 years (or even 10), and next to that where that innovation was made and by whom. Then we would have some idea of how to make an innovation ranking.
Bloomberg's rankings don't look at actual innovations but rather the potential for innovations being created.
For example, India produces something like 25% of the world's engineers, but I'm pretty sure 25% of the world's engineering is not being done in India.
Here's Bloomberg's categories:
R&D intensity (R&D expenditure as % of GDP)
Manufacturing value-added (MVA as % GDP and per capita)
Productivity (GDP and GNI per employed person age 15+ and 3Y improvement)
High-tech density (Number of domestic high-tech public companies such as aerospace, defense, biotech,hardware, software, semiconductors, internet software and services, and renewable energy companies as % of publicly listed companies and as share of total world public high-tech)
Tertiary efficiency (how much of population has advanced degrees in the labor force plus what percent is tech degrees)
Researcher concentration (percent of population (per million) that are engaged in R&D)
Patent activity (patent filings, patents in force, per million population, patent filings per $100 billion GDP, and total grants by country as share of world total.)
Countries whose economies grow a lot of food, or use natural resources, or have low unemployment get dinged by the per capita and percent rankings. Bloomberg's methodology favors small manufacturing-intensive countries whether or not that country actually invents anything new at all.
That's why Iceland is above Russia.
Or Ireland above the UK. really?
You imagine you are smart, which is a function of how you are not.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
It's harder to name something innovative that DIDN'T start here than the reverse
Space travel - first man made object in space was the V2. Early space program in both US and USSR carried on from German rocketry, with German scientists
Quantum mechanics - Planck is usually considered to be first. Einstein is German born but a US citizen, then you've got Heisenberg and Born for Germany and Schrodinger from Austria. I'm not arguing Einstein's importance, nor his citizenship, but QM DIDN'T start in the US
Nuclear bombs - the US produced the first, but the ideas around fission go back to the 30s and both the USSR and Germany had independent and parallel programs. Not sure that it's innovation if others are doing it and you just beat them to production.
Tang - a powdered fruit drink? Powdered milk and instant coffee go back to the late 1800s. I'm not sure that Tang qualifies as innovative (unless there's more to it than I understand)
Of the other examples, some are weak (Commercial space flight is double counting, the innovative part is space flight, commercialising technology is ordinary), others are evolutionary (Google's search engine, the iPhone) which while still innovative are weakly so.
The clearest example you provide is the Internet. While other countries provided some of the early elements (UK and packet switching for eg), the overall concept, development and the majority of the work was all US.
Patents are the *opposite* of innovation.
I said America first and I meant it, not some foreign country like "Inner vashun". Where the hell is that? Part of outer mongolioid? Anyway. Back to fox news. Did you see Megin Kelly ream that Janey Fonda bitch? I gotta see that again in slo-mo. Eric! Get me some god-damn cheeseburgers, boy.
And lawful-bribery....
Because if you want to evaluate how good a country is at fostering innovation, you should be measuring how efficient they are, not how many heads you can throw at a problem.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
Pretty much the only big tech company in Europe is Phillips, and arguably their most high tech product is LED lights
Philips also makes high-end medical devices: magnetic resonance scanners, tomographs, radiation therapy systems, and so on.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Yes, but who do you think owns patents on parts you in US use?
Later on in your post you nitpick about who manufactures it, yet here you nitpick about who invented it. But even then, this is just that, a nitpick, because very few components are covered by foreign patents. I recall when SpaceX first successfully landed a first stage rocket, and they shouted USA! USA! USA! internet forums, including slashdot, were being raged at by people abroad saying that it wasn't just the USA that did that...only, it was just the USA. SpaceX is 100% domestic, and the company that paid for the launch is also a US company. And most importantly, NOBODY else has pulled anything even close to that off. The US private sector is technologically superior to every government in the world in this respect. But that doesn't even touch on NASA. The ESA has yet to run a single successful Mars mission in spite of many attempts. Russia has, but they're mostly failures. The US has run many more than both combined, and nearly all were successful, some succeeding by far beyond what the original mission called for.
Yes, the US really is THAT much better than the rest of the world here, and coming soon to a global theater near you, we're going to put a submarine under titan's ice, and the James Webb Space Telescope will be a NASA creation, with relatively small assistance from ESA and CSA, and is in fact being constructed by two US companies.
The best the US can do is 80s/90s era ICs. Modern ICs drive the high bandwidth of the modern Internet. Welcome.
If I didn't already know you were somebody butthurt over the US utterly dominating this space, I'd think you were making a joke. The #1 and #2 top creators of CPUs and GPUs are US companies, and most of the world's most used ASICs (especially ASICs that power most advanced networking equipment like switches and certain types of routers) are created here. The top technology companies for internet communication in the world are Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm, and Broadcom. Nokia comes close admittedly in just the wireless side, but they still don't match those four. Anything beyond these, i.e. realtek or huawei, create substandard components. Quite simply, without us, the rest of the world would be back in the 90's.
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.
Pretty sure he's referring to making practical uses for quantum mechanics. Presently that is 85% only the US, with China being maybe another 10%, with the rest being divided among other places.
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?
You're handwaving away the fact that Google is still at the forefront of AI research and development. They're also at the forefront of self driving cars, the world's most used web browser, the world's most used smartphone OS, the world's most used email service, and web search engines, in which theirs is the one that most of the world is hopelessly dependent upon. Though they're not unique in this regard, as the world's economies are hopelessly dependent upon much US technology, including our ICs, namely those made by Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, and US software from the likes of Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, Adobe, Amazon, and many others.
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.
And at the start of your post, you were acting as though the intellectual property matters the most, but
Space travel - first man made object in space was the V2. Early space program in both US and USSR carried on from German rocketry, with German scientists
Early USSR rocketry experiments were done before and during the WWII, resulting in development of Katyusha ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). By the end of the WWII, the USSR already had a sophisticated homegrown rocketry program. As a result, Soviet rocket designs were completely unlike the German V2s.
German scientists were mostly captured by the US for obvious reasons.
So you think throwing a dog into orbit to die counts as space travel and the US did no original or innovative work in this area?
The Russians were also the first to send a human into space.
You were saying...?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Space travel. The Internet. iPhones. Commercial space travel. Quantum mechanics. Nuclear bombs. Tang. Google.
Yes, the US used to do great things. But genetic engineering on humans? China only, due to regulations. Space travel? Well, the US government canceled all its programs, and buys space on other's launches. Some private work, but that's being duplicated by others elsewhere in the world, and the lead isn't clear, and the lead is by an immigrant from Africa. Nuclear Bombs. Nope. The US is not working on new nuclear bombs. Rather than decommissioning thousands and replacing them with hundreds, for cost savings while not decreasing strike capabilities, the US spends defense budgets on airplanes to replace old ones that do a better job than the new ones.
It's harder to name something innovative that DIDN'T start here than the reverse.
Well, since you are going back 50+ years, who made the first automobile?And your space travel example is insane. First man in space? First man in orbit? First satellite? First rocket? None of that was US. The US had the first man on the moon. Yay, one first out of hundreds. So let's pretend that's the only one that matters. How's that Space Shuttle program doing?
Learn to love Alaska
Frauenhofer Society (research in many fields... chances are you're using one of their codecs). Spotify? Skype? SAP? Waze and TomTom? And there are countless smaller firms. Which in a lot of cases are absorbed by American ones.
America's advantage isn't its R&D or climate for innovation, but its market. The US market offers opportunity and a large enough volume to allow startups instant access to an enormous market that helps them grow quickly into companies valued in the billions, and ready to take on the world. Europe may have a single market, which helps, but it isn't a homogeneous one by any means. Even companies offering digital services find it hard and expensive to establish themselves in markets other than their home country, and they often take a good while to expand beyond the border.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
For every high tech company you can name overseas, the US has one that outclasses it in every way
So what company in the US outclasses ASML in every way? And Bosch? Or Toyota?
Pretty much the only big tech company in Europe is Phillips
If you choose to ignore ABB, Akzo Nobel, Alstom, Airbus, ASML, AstraZeneca, BAE, BASF, Bayer, BMW, Bosch, Continental, Daimler, Dassault, Dürr, Electrolux, Ericsson, Fiat, Fresenius, GlaxoSmithKline, Ineos, Infineon, KUKA, Leonardo, Mahle, Merck, Michelin, Nokia, Novartis, NXP, Osram, PSA, Renault, Rheinmetall, Roche, Rolls Royce, Safran, Sanofi, SAP, Schaeffler, SKF, Siemens, STMicroelectronics, Technicolor, ThyssenKrupp, Voestalpine, Voith, Volkswagen, Volvo, Wärtsilä, Zeiss, ZF and quite a few others, and drop a superfluous L in the name of Philips, sure. There are many, many more small ones too.
And where do the machines come from to make these wafers?
16th. ranked The Netherlands is where some of the most advanced are made by ASML, the others are Nikon and Canon.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Do you think engineer in the US actually put together blueprints for A10 processor?
Yup. Most of Apple's CPU design team is based in the US. Qualcomm also has a large team in San Diego and most CPU vendors do a lot of design work in Austin.
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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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You may want to research things a little instead of being a Humpty Dumpty about what means what. Just Google “examples of microaggressions” and see what comes out. The first is some Buzzfeed article, but for the sake of everyone involved I will link you to the second hit from a somewhat more reputable .edu address.
Is this you understanding of “being a dick”? Half of these are things I have never heard anyone say in a ten mile radius of a college campus, the other half are so benign that you have to have very special interpretative skills to qualify that as being anything close to a dick. QED: I believe the most qualified person should get the job. and Why do you have to be so loud / animated? Just calm down. Christ, I am certain that by many definitions your whole post is a major microaggression because you are not letting dicks express themselves or something like that.
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.
None of the measures mentioned actually track innovation. The measures specified can be pretty subjective and not necessarily relevant to innovation although I can see how some old schoolers would assume them to be indicators of potential for innovation. Post-Secondary and Tertiary graduates in the workforce, for example. Investment in Research and Development, for example. Much of the microcomputing technology was born in the U.S. by college dropouts. Furthermore, the qualities of engineers in some of these countries are pretty controversial, such as the very high rate of cheating on exams and even peer review papers from Chinese. Moreover, in the U.S. (and I think likely the world), most R&D money is spent by large corporations but it springs up predominantly from small businesses. That fact alone pretty much kills the validity of calling this a measurement of Innovation by different countries. In any case, it's all indirect and will be very hard to argue any correlation with actual innovative output.
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.
The US had freedom of speech, but it also had McCarthyism and racial segregation. That was my point really, how free you were in the US greatly depended on things like your skin colour and political beliefs.
While there were different issues in Europe, for example, you can't easily make a simple, qualitative comparison of some kind of meaningless "average freedom" for whole populations. All you can do is acknowledge the issues, e.g. most places outlawed homosexuality and that was really bad for a lot of people. For them no country was particularly "great" if it regarded their sexuality as a crime.
By the way, most of the freedoms you describe were available in western Europe from the 1950s onward too. Similar education systems too, although of course like the US there was widespread discrimination.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
USA is also likely still #1 if this rating had to do with "total innovation" instead of being closer to "innovation per capita". The actual Bloomberg research paper is paywalled, but most of the rankings use terminology such as intensity, density, concentration, etc. which probably mean they are trying to prevent countries from dominating the ranking simply because they have more people. Otherwise USA and China would likely be #1 and #2 (with the EU probably being either #1 or #2 if considered as a whole).
When it comes to the actual economic might which is developed through R&D spending and other innovation related activities, population is a huge multiplier though. This is why countries like the US and China will still be the places where most innovation come from for the foreseeable future no matter how well smaller countries perform in rankings such as these.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Actually proportionally Israel is way more popular than the US. Medical tourism to the US is basically an exception.
Here's the actual data: https://www.cihi.ca/sites/defa... The average treatment time for cancer in Canada is less than 20 days. In the US many people simply used to get NO cancer treatment whatsoever.
approximately zero rich Americans leave the country for major medical treatments.
Only if you mean 1.4 million when you say "approximately zero".
Nothing in that article mentions how many "rich" Americans go overseas for medical care. It includes all Americans, including the over 10 million Americans without medical insurance.
Also note that the top two reasons to leave the country are cosmetic surgery and dentistry, two areas where insurance coverage is very low in the US.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke