The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
bloomberg.comWhat drags the US down most in these rankings is "tertiary efficiency": roughly the fraction of people in grad school or with graduate degrees.
Ranking countries is a dodgy business, even more than ranking colleges. A different set of weights or ways of measuring things could give you totally different answers.
If you're looking for a way to claim the rankings are biased, you might argue that this up-ranks countries that value credentials over actual innovation. Or you might claim that these days, an undergrad education is enough to go out in the world and innovate and that countries that send more students through grad school are wasting their time. Or you might claim that the US is a developed country with a developing country attached, which drags down the averages. And probably California, NY, MA and a few other states considered independently would rank highly.
When casual readers see results titled "Bloomberg Innovation Index" (myself included, a while ago), there's a tendency due to brand reputation (Bloomberg!) to believe that this is some scientifically and statistically rigorous analysis of a well-defined "innovation" that can be trusted. This is dangerous, and IMO disappointing (I know, I was naive and optimistic) regarding the statistical credibility of many "reputable" sources.
In reality (as you describe), these are completely arbitrary human-designed heuristic scores with most likely no statistical significance.
I really wish we could qualify these "rankings" with a more honest term , like:
"statistically useless, arbitrarily rated average of multiple human designed score scales, meant to loosely relate to some quality we want to measure, but in reality is more a game of politics and adversarial score optimization."
But that doesn't have the same 'ring' to it as "top country rankings in innovation".
It sounds a little like denial. I mean, Bloomberg does a great job, its pretty simple: "The 2018 ranking process began with more than 200 economies. Each was scored on a 0-100 scale based on seven equally weighted categories. Nations that didn’t report data for at least six categories were eliminated".
So its an equally weighted average of 7 categories. The data was reported by the nations themselves.
Now the key takeaway is that the US dropped out of the top 10. Comparatively, you can tell something is changing in the US causing a drop.
Metrics are just indicator, and can sometimes misrepresent the reality, but more often, there's truth in the metrics also. Its hard to say what the impact of this innovation score is, is it economic, or is it social, but clearly the score change is due to real realities changing.
> Comparatively, you can tell something is changing in the US causing a drop.
The reported numbers from other countries, or the reported numbers from the US, could also be flawed. Just because numbers have changed relative to one another, doesn't mean that countries have done so as well. You are assuming a particular causal relationship when there are several plausible alternative theories available.
> more often, there's truth in the metrics
Metric isn't the right word. It would make sense for tangible qualities like area, population, and even GNP. But the measured quality here is "innovation," with an amalgam of other characteristics taken as the one true proxy thereof. It's a ranking, but it's not actually measuring innovation.
> clearly the score change is due to real realities changing.
It could also be a change in reported numbers. Or even random noise that tends to revert. These numbers may not even be relevant to the true seeds of innovation.
You've hit the nail on the head I think.
It's the change in relative rankings that is the useful data from these rankings, rather than the absolute ranking.
Presumably OP is calling into question any such ranking, not just the recent ranking where the US dropped out.
> Comparatively, you can tell something is changing in the US causing a drop.
Yes, one of the factors they used to come up with this rating. Now - the question is, are those factors actually correlated with innovation?
Sorry but not buying it. The selection of even 7 categories, let alone suggesting that such categories should be equally weighted is unreliable at best. The nations self-reporting the data is completely irrelevant and, again, at best unreliable.
Now, maybe the US isn't as innovative as Sweden is. Ok. What exactly does that mean? Why do I care if the percentage of graduate educated people is higher? How does that actually affect innovation? Are those people releasing new, globally-changing products and services? What are some examples?
What does it mean if Samsung has more US patents than any other company besides IBM? Is IBM more innovative than Google?
It's fun and popular to bash the U.S. (has been for some time) but I really don't see much meaning behind these rankings. It's not an in-depth study. Amazon has more criteria for picking a HQ. Do you really think Bloomberg can look at these '7 criteria' and come up with a meaningful estimation? No.
> Now, maybe the US isn't as innovative as Sweden is. Ok. What exactly does that mean?
It means exactly the same thing it meant when US was among top. There were people who were interested in it and sometimes happy about it. Those very same people are still interested, but this time wonder whether it means something is changing for worst.
So it was meaningless still. There’s nothing to be interest about here unless unfounded clickbait is a hobby.
You should apply this kind of logic to scientific papers too. It's infuriating that some papers manage to get published that have the type of errors that would at the very least gotten a letter grade taken off(if not an F) for papers I wrote in undergrad physics labs.
Oh I absolutely do, and IMO this scientific irresponsibility is far more dangerous within fields that actually call themselves "sciences" -- at least these "indexes" don't claim to be scientific (even if some people erroneously assume otherwise, such as my former self). There are certain fields with the word "science" in the title that are notoriously awful in this respect. (I won't name names, just for the sake of simplifying the discussion, but it's not hard to find out.)
Even the notion "hard science" vs "soft science" is a very slippery slope, IMO. We should not seek to speak of "hard" vs "soft" science; instead, we should focus on distinguishing good from bad science. Even science performed on incredibly difficult and complex topics (with immensely numerous confounding variables, near impossibility of controlled trials/experiments, etc.) can still be done correctly! One simply needs to adhere to statistical rigor and qualify conclusions from data with appropriate levels of uncertainty, withhold conclusions with no predictive power or statistical significance, and publish meaningful negative results just as frequently as positive results.
This movement of lax scientific rigor within fields that call themselves "sciences" is incredibly dangerous and threatens to erode the credibility of all results/fields that call themselves "scientific" in the eyes of the general public -- the vast majority of whom do not have the time, energy, or ability to review each field and/or publication to understand how rigorous and honest it actually is.
When you read about problems of anti-intellectualism and public distrust in science, the first thing we should do is look to the "sciences" (and bad journalism) that justify this distrust.
You forgot the elephant in the room. Money. Everyday these writers have to make up the most outlandish "story/fake news" to get you to click to sell you ads.
"statistically useless, arbitrarily rated average of multiple human designed score scales, meant to loosely relate to some quality we want to measure, but in reality is more a game of politics and adversarial score optimization." while honest and true doesn't get the masses clicking. Honest and true doesn't get stories bumped to the frontpage of HN.
I do feel for these journalists. They are like daily vloggers who have to deal with the constant pressure of generating content every single day to make money. That's like clickbait is so rampant in both the traditional and social media.
In other words it is about as rigorous as any other Internet listicle[1].
These rankings need to account for mobility of high profile graduate students. For example some of the top CS programs in Canada have 50-75% of graduates leave for the US tech sector. Canada gets rewarded for it's STEM grads who end up working for US companies in the US market while the US gets punished for it's lower domestic STEM grad production. If the rest of the world is producing a fairly substantial number of educated people who work for US companies on US innovations does it make sense to say it's less innovative? Sweden is #2 in Large part because there aren't categories that measure Venture Capital Invested in Country or New Business Formation. Is it really the case that a few more net patents filed is more valuable to innovation than having companies like Dropbox, AirBnB and Stripe? (Feel free to pick your start-ups of choice here).
Weighted score rankings are useless / statistically irrelevant, no matter how much careful hand-tuning we do. The only way to maintain accuracy and scientific responsibility in such things is to:
1) Formally define what is meant by "innovation" in terms of clearly measurable outcomes.
2) Measure this clearly-defined quality among all countries and many sample points through time.
3) Try to separate out explanatory variables for the quality being measured. Build these data driven statistical models to model this formally defined "innovation" quantity -- not using hand-tuned weights of various measures, as these "rankings" or "indexes" often do.
4) Try to predict a probability distribution of the "innovation" quality, using models developed in step 3.
Step 1 should be qualified with explanation that this human-designed definition is an imperfect, and that all results should be understood in the context of this formal definition.
Step 2 should be qualified with notes of any possible limitations in the sampling methodology (availability of data, etc.) and how this factors into error margins.
Step 3 should be qualified with sufficient explanation that it's a model of reality derived from data, and therefore risks overfitting/underfitting/etc. errors.
Step 4 should be qualified with an explanation that this is a prediction based on the above model fit, and therefore is subject to potential errors compounded by any of the previous steps.
That would be the scientifically/statistically responsible and rigorous thing to do. But I suppose I'm crazy to expect Bloomberg to aim for any level of rigor in these "indexes".
> Formally define what is meant by "innovation" in terms of clearly measurable outcomes.
Surely you can see that this is not possible, and any attempted would be superficial and would be gamed anyway?
“Innovation” is a very slippery term, so I agree defining it would be more difficult than other measures. So for simplicity, let’s use something a bit simpler, like a “quality of living index” or “overall human well-being index”.
It’s not feasible for a human to define such a metric formally upon ‘environmental variables’ (such as education stats, graduation rates, etc.) — quite obviously, as you say — yet trivial to define it as an “outcome measure”, where we directly measure the quantity in question (no matter how difficult or expensive to sample this variable).
To the “quality of living index” example: One could design a polling methodology to fairly reliably gauge people’s overall happiness and satisfaction in a country. This polling would be expensive, so we couldn’t do it super broadly or super frequently — and that’s why we use the subsequent steps described in my parent post (on forming statistical models to separate out connected variables that we can easily and cheaply measure to approximately model the “ground truth” happiness metric).
You can then use this “model fit” to predict this extremely expensive “ground truth” notion of individual happiness in this case, on a much more frequent and granular basis than would ordinarily have been feasible using a ground truth gathering method like a polling process.
There are more successful startups in Sweden per capita than in the US. Just get over yourself.
I have seen enough "brilliant stuff that I can't talk about" in my career that I think you really can't ignore military/paramilitary R&D spending. But nor can you really measure the innovation that comes out of it, since countries are largely going to keep their coolest, newest stuff as national secrets.
The innovation you can see and experience in a product like Facebook or VKontakte is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the unseen tech from the three-letter agencies of many different countries, that are mining, scraping, and reducing the data.
But there's a lot of anti-innovation going on in that sector too, I'm sure.
The fact that Germany ranks 4th in innovation makes this list not very meaningful to me. Germany is one of the most conservative and tech-averse countries I know, and they are struggling to get theirs businesses up to date.
Seeing how developed nations(particularly with service-based economies) depend on ever-increasing specialization to drive economic growth and efficiency, what makes you think the percentage of grad students and graduates _wouldn't_ be a good proxy for relative economic strength?
At first blush, the idea that comes to mind is this: Innovation and associated economic growth isn't the exclusive domain of grad students and graduates. Undergraduates can innovate, as do lots of people who are in private industry and not associated with academia at all.
Of course all that means is that it isn't a perfect proxy. It may well still be a good proxy. Tough to call.
Others can innovate but it really isn't their full time job
I thought "Tertiary education" includes undergrad : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education
Here's the indicators that bloomberg uses for constructing the factor:
1. Gross tertiary enrollment ratio
2. Percentage of working-age population with advanced level of education
3. Annual new science and engineering graduates as a percentage total tertiary graduates
4. Annual new science and engineering graduates as a percentage of the labor force
>Or you might claim that the US is a developed country with a developing country attached
huh?
You've never been to central California or the Mid West? In contrast with the West and East coasts, they look about as developed as Belize - including in Hollywood movies, I dare add. It's like, there are a few mansions here and there, but there are also a lot of crack shacks and developing world worthy public infrastructure.
"California is not on the coast because it doesn't fit my narrative where I bash poorer parts of the country"
In the USA we crucify our heroes and our workers and our ethnic and sexual minorities. LGBTQ people are constantly hounded, and people belief the worst rumors and smear articles about women, but nothing about men.
luckily my friends and I are black-shifting these deep blue pigs, who eat people, and are creating a new era where people are allowed to write their own story.
So how would one measure a region's demonstrated capacity for innovation, in a meaningful way?
Imo focus on output of new technologies.
I can see flaws in that potential approach too. For example, if a country has high R&D investment/capacity, but most manufacturing or commercialisation activities happen abroad, then simply measuring output of new technologies doesn't account for the R&D.
Using the Bloomberg list, Austria ranks 12th overall, but 5th on R&D. Their figure is dragged down by a 26th rank in High-Tech Density. Then, Germany's High-Tech density is ranked 3rd overall. Perhaps one could hypothesise that much of Austria's R&D effort ends up commercialised in Germany.
Yeah that's a good point. You can look at where a company is incorporated, but they still may do R&D in different parts of the world. Could be resolved by taking the "new technologies output" of a company, but then dividing it to each country it does R&D in with proportion to the cost of that R&D.
Honestly a lot of these "global" rating systems are ridiculous. The US easily produces the most innovation globally.
This is similar to ranking systems that consider McGill the Harvard of Canada or consider Babson College the #1 for Entrepreneurship.
>The US easily produces the most innovation globally
As would be expected given the size of the US population. The only two more populous countries are both developing nations. But a ranking that didn't normalise over the size of the population would make even less sense than this one.
> As would be expected given the size of the US population.
How about california innovates more than germany or UK combined? How about massachussetts innovates more than France? Would that be better?
The beauty of stats is that you can manipulate and twist to for whatever agenda you want to show.
Is this like a gut feeling or something? Like, totally based on like, the HN bubble, like totally.
Yeah, innovation levels differ much more within countries than between them. Rankings of metro areas would make more sense.
By the same ranking, China is way below the US. It has a lot of educated people, we can argue that it has innovation in its first tier cities, but it also has A LOT of uneducated farmers.
The EU is a confederation. They need to be considered as a block now. Don't look at Germany. Look at the EU.
The countries in the EU go to war independently, the states of the US do so as one. I think that's where the line goes, really.
True, the EU is a confederation. Also true: it's not a country.
What's a country? Well, it has a single currency. The EU does... almost.
A country has a border that it controls. The EU does... more or less.
A country has a military. The EU absolutely does not.
And a country thinks of itself as a country. The EU does not. I suspect that this last reason is why the media doesn't report on the EU as if it were a single country.
The US didn't think of itself as a country until after the civil war. Even once the Federal government took power, individuals aligned more with their state than their State.
As to the EU having a military? They're getting there with the US finally starting to get tired of defending the region with little respect. https://www.wikitribune.com/story/2017/11/15/european_union/...
I can't. There are tons of EU countries missing from this list.
They should have rolled them all up into the EU. It infuriates me that no one does. Not for crime reports. Not for economic reports. The media doesn't do it right.
Does the EU? Do they produce EU-wide crime reports? EU-wide economic reports?
If not, don't blame the media...
Yes, on all common metrics, in great detail: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat
Your examples aren't terribly good at proving your point. How is McGill reputation related to ranking systems? In fact even if Babson is a small school, the number of startups to student ratio isn't devoid of value as a ranking system. These types of ranking show country or organizations that punch above their weight.
> McGill the Harvard of Canada
You seem to have an axe to grind. No published ranking I know of ever uses that phrase. The phrase really only appears in newspaper articles, and only because American reporters want to pep up their piece about universities in Canada, which the average American knows close to nothing about.
McGill is a good school. It's silly to be a "Harvard" of anything.
It would perhaps be more interesting to look at cities, or for the us at least states.
The discussion so far reminds me a little of whenever a "Top N school rankings" report comes out. People who go (or went) to any of the top-ranked schools will use it to argue that their schools are better, and people who go to the lower-ranked schools will downplay the results, nit-pick the methodology, point out that the top N are all within a small margin of error, etc. A little tribalism?
Being from the US I think we deserve to be off this list.
We aren’t making America great nor are we doing anything to better the world or our own people. We emphasize the wrong attributes of success which.
If one wants to improve something, one nees a little self-sadism, the wish to shine a light on the ugly spots until things improve.
Is the metric for most stem masters or phds useful? The Soviet Union use to produce many such people but never achieved much.
I disagree.
Some of the Soviet scientists who won a Nobel Prize in science [1]:
- 1958 Pavel Cherenkov, Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm "for the discovery and interpretation of the Cherenkov effect"
- 1962 Lev Landau "for his theories about condensed matter, particularly about liquid helium superfluidity"
- 1964 Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov "for fundamental work in the area of the quantum electronics, which led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers on the basis of the maser laser principle"
Additionally, some of the other areas where Soviets contributed to research and innovation include [2]:
- stem cells
- light emitting diodes
- electric rocket motor
- blood bank
- paratrooping
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_the_...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation...
edit: formatting
But the USSR failed anyways, and it failed to innovate enough before it failed to overcome the downsides of communism. That's the point.
You can have lots of people with post-grad credentials whose creativity is not fully utilized. Or who don't really have the requisite creativity in spite of their credentials. The USSR may have had quality and quantity in spades (maybe it really did!) but their economic structure wasted that advantage.
> But the USSR failed anyways, and it failed to innovate enough before it failed to overcome the downsides of communism.
You mean “the downside of starting off as a poorly-developed state engaged in a multi-generation combination of outright war and proxy wars and military spending races with the most advanced countries in the world”.
No. A number of successful countries started off "as a poorly-developed state engaged in outright war and proxy wars". The U.S. itself, for example. And Israel, for another. Stop making excuses.
And, as if the arms race of the Cold War did not involve choices made by the Soviets! Come off it. They could easily have chosen not to get dragged into an arms race. But instead they chose no only to play that game, but to then start quite a few expensive proxy wars... Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, a number of civil wars in Africa, Nicaragua, ... These were their choices.
So? The original point being disputed was that SU and Soviet people "never achieved much" which is not true in many areas, one of which is becoming a militarily powerful country able to engage in a stand off with USA while 100 years ago Poland beat Soviet Russia in a war a year after gaining its own independence.
Saying that "they are stupid because they were still communists" or that other countries were successful is moving the goal post.
Israel was a very special situation due to UN, Holocaust, ties to the West, etc. and USA is on outright easy mode in comparison because of their remote placement, size and abundance of everything and it has had tons of quiet time to develop and attracted the brightest people from the world for a while to come to live and work there. I'd say Japan or Prussia or Singapore were better sudden (under 100 years) success stories.
> The original point being disputed was that SU and Soviet people "never achieved much"
But they didn't achieve much in reality. That's why they have to copy most of their technologies from other countries during all their 70 years.
They did not achieve much in comparison to the rest of the world. Come on, it's obvious:
I could go on. But really, no, the USSR did not come close to the U.S. as to innovation, not because the USSR lacked talented people (it had them in spades) or a decent tech education system (it had a very good tech education system), but because its economic system could not make the best of those resources. It's that simple.- a non-hungry society? NO - wealthy society? certainly not - advanced and commercially successful airliners? no (but you'll pick a nit here, I'm sure) - advanced medicine? no (cue BS about how wonderful medicine is in Cuba, but still no) - advanced computing devices? no, certainly nothing like those available in the West by 1991, much less anything since - the Internet? NO - putting a man on the moon? (hardly important, but) no - a myriad of consumer products of varying technological content, from the trivial to the highly advanced? NO, see the first item - how about... cars... anti-lock brakes, catalytic converters, airbags...? noIt's easy to make exclusive lists to try and make one country or another look better.
And who is the rest of the world? The USSR achieved a lot in comparison to Africa, South America, the Middle East, and SE Asia.
If you consider the gulag an achievement, sure!
I would definitely NOT say that the USSR achieved more than Latin America. People in much of LatAm are happy and reasonably free -- very free by comparison to the USSR. But I guess you wouldn't consider freedom an achievement -- too easy, perhaps? or maybe not to your liking?
Argentina was throwing dissidents out of planes into the Atlantic ocean in the 1980's. Chile had Pinochet. Colombia only just recently signed a peace treaty with FARC, drawing down a 50 year conflict that has killed >200,000 people. Guatemala had an almost 40 year civil war. El Salvador had a 12 year civil war. I could go on...
One thing that a lot of these conflicts and situations had in common is that the USA covertly overthrew a democratically elected, socialist leaning government using the CIA. Thousands of people were killed due to the meddling of the USA and the CIA.
Yes, Latin America had dark times, but before, and after, it's been rather OK -- certainly fantastic by comparison to the USSR. There are no gulags in Chile or Argentina, or Brazil, or... And Chile is doing very well -- they're the tiger of LatAm. Colombia has finally beaten back the guerillas and is doing rather well considering. And Venezuela? Yeah, not well, not Venezuela -- wonder why /s
> A number of successful countries started off "as a poorly-developed state engaged in outright war and proxy wars". The U.S. itself, for example
The US did not go through a long period of active direct and proxy conflict with the most advanced contemporary nations at it's founding. It fought a brief war to separate (which it was losing until a major power opposed to Britain intervened), and then not much with any major power till it decided to take advantage of the Napoleonic Wars and the pretext of impressment to seize British Canada (unsuccessfully). The US was a sideshow isolated by oceans for the major powers for almost as long after it's formation as the USSR existed.
> The US did not go through a long period of active direct and proxy conflict with the most advanced contemporary nations at it's founding
Yes it did : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
But instead they chose no only to play that game, but to then start quite a few expensive proxy wars... Korea, Vietnam
Actually the Korean War was started upon strong insistence of Kim, Il Sung of North Korea. Sure Soviets gave the approval, but only reluctantly.
That is certainly one way of rephrasing, but the fact remains that of those things you list, many are the result of the ideological focus on spreading communism. So, in a way, the parent post is right that they failed to get past the downsides of communism.
Not innovative it was...
American measures of creativity are narrow minded, short sighted, taken from singular point of view.
The first two domestic microwave ovens in the Ussr were: first one, built without a magnetron, with "surplus" solid state RF emitters because all magnetrons were spent on military radars; second one, made with multi-kilowatt, water cooled klystron and weighted 60 kg, because the designer thought "with klystron, we can modulate the power with a cheap rheostat" without having to use "complex, tricky, always breaking mechanical timers."
"USA does not have talent to build kitchen appliances out of super duper expensive mil-spec components?" - will ask some. No, but US simply never had conditions that would've required creative solutions to problems like "how to make consumer goods when the whole country has been turned into a munitions factory?"
What I can jab commenters above with is that behind each "particularly creative" article an American big co. releases, there are thousands of anonymous engineers, designers, software developers and many other highly skilled people working in outsourcing sweatshops in Asia.
For each "creativish" GUI app, there are thousands of research hours of anonymous geniuses that went into fundamental research in computer science and electronics engineering that made it possible that you can carry computing power of a supercomputer from few generations ago in your pocket.
Now, how many artsy, creativish, anorexic tech CEOs there are in US who are, say, epitaxy metrology specialists who know how to grow 3D transistors with 10 times fewer mask scans than a competitor?
3 scientists from country with population ~200 million and during 70 years period?
Yep, they produced a lot of research. So, how did they apply these technologies to create products the market actually want? And abundance for all people to lead better lives?
This is an odd redefinition of innovation. Is Snapchat more innovative than a proof of the Riemann hypothesis? Number of people who Snapchat: apparently at least 178 million. Number of people who want a proof of the Riemann hypothesis? Maybe a million? Out of which probably ten thousand will actually read it?
Yes, the Soviet Union had many problems, but
>how did they apply these technologies to create products the market actually want
is essentially just asking "why were they communist and not capitalist?"
They're a lot easier to move, if you own the goalposts.
"Creating [new/different] products the market actually wants" is a pretty reasonable definition of innovation.
The Riemann hypothesis? That's research, not innovation. It's still valuable, but it's not innovation. (Is it as valuable as innovation? Arguably yes, but it's still not innovation.)
> "Creating [new/different] products the market actually wants" is a pretty reasonable definition of innovation.
No, it's at best cherry picking and at worst terrible redefinition of innovation. Innovation is defined as "the action or process of innovating" [1] and innovating is defined as "make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products" [2].
So, while creating new products is innovating, innovating is not necessarily creating new products. In fact, I'd argue that without new methods and ideas, you wouldn't be able to create new products. So, a new hypothesis, by definition, is absolutely innovation.
1. https://www.google.com/search?ei=ENJnWq_SO8zvzgKh8JOQAg&q=de...
2. https://www.google.com/search?ei=ENJnWq_SO8zvzgKh8JOQAg&q=de...
The original point was that SU never achieved much in any area (which is clearly not true). A point could today be made that lots of research in the USA with its growing inequality is also not being used to create 'an abundance for all people to lead better lives'.
The median full-time wage in the US is 70% higher than the EU median full-time wage.
The high US inequality is a result of the spectacularly extreme outcomes that come from simultaneously having a very large integrated economy & population base, extremely high economic output, and extreme national wealth.
If you integrated large parts Europe, you'd see a similar extreme inequality between eg the top end of Norway or Sweden, and the bottom of Bulgaria or Moldova. Or othewise the top end of wealth outcomes, such as Amancio Ortega or Bernard Arnault, versus the bottom end of wealth outcomes in Croatia. Except the US bottom is dramatically above the bottom of Europe.
I won't bankrupt if I get sick or get in accident, even if I get sick while unemployed.
I don't have college debt. And also those who were not able to finish college are not crippled by debt till end of their lives.
Aaaand your wage statistic does not count in surplus of prisoners US have.
They beat the US in sending the first man to space.
Saying that “they never achieved much” is a gigantic understatement!!
Fair point. Poor wording on my part.
Given the way the ranking under discussion values tertiary education and given how much the Soviets had them but didn't succeed economically, is having a high number of them really beneficial? It takes resources and time to get a PhD or a masters. Are these the best thing on which to spend them? Do they really matter? Can you be more practically innovative with simple undergrad degrees?
Innovation and economic success are not the same thing.
While not necessarily so, they do seem to have are strong causal relationship. The more innovative an economy, the more economic freedom it has.
And today, when American astronauts need a ride to space, guess who we have to bum it from?
It's a disgusting state of affairs, regardless of anyone's opinion on Russia.
Rides into space and rocket engines are not the only thing USA needs Russian Federation for [0] and [1]. (The second reference has a misleading url; the artcile's actual title is "Why the U.S. Is Buying Natural Gas From Russia").
[0] https://www.rt.com/business/415345-united-states-buying-russ...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/how-the-u...
Pretty silly context dropping.
The US has superior launch capability to Russia. SpaceX performed more launches all by itself in 2017 than all of the large Russian nation that has been doing space launches for 60 years. That gap is about to get dramatically worse over the next five years.
And also sent first woman to space. First dog(s) too. First orbiting spacecraft etc.
The first nuclear power plant connected to the grid to actually power stuff was one in the SU. The first artificial satellite, first animal in orbit and first human in space are all from SU. The first properly continuously inhabited space station Mir was also theirs. Then they (Russian which is de facto descendant of and was most important part of SU before it dissolved) also contributed to the ISS along the US. They also made the Tsar Bomba, FOBS, AK, Katyusha, RPG, Su, MiG, T tanks, etc. and had other weapon, space and medicine related achievements.
In the interwar period in 1919-1921 war SU was also badly beat up by 'weaker' Poland (that only gained independence in 1918 after 123 years since it was partitioned completely in the last of 3 partitions) and it and its satellite states in Warsaw Pact/Eastern Bloc grew to be strong enough to engage in a stand off with USA and the West.
If that's not much then I don't know what is.
And yet they didn't produce that much stuff that people actually wanted. If you went to a grocery store in Moscow in the 80s the shelves were empty unless you knew when the store would buy the allotted inventory.
Not saying the USSR didn't produce a lot of good research and science but they weren't the best at transferring that research into technology the people really wanted. Because of the free market the US and Europe could try all different kinds of hardware and software ideas that lead to the ecosystem we have today, for example. Same thing with finance.
> Not saying the USSR didn't produce a lot of good research and science but they weren't the best at transferring that research into technology the people really wanted
They did not cared, in the first place through. They were not capitalist. They actual failure is that they did not achieved world domination and that they did not managed to build that new superior human they wanted. Those were the ideological goals.
They also did monernized Russia after they came to power, monarchy they replaced was very behind the technology of the time.
Ironically though, many rockets built by companies specializing in the US defense are dependent on Russian rocket engines to send their vehicles into space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180#Replacement_for_the_RD-...
Yes, those engines (and ISS parts) were specifically ordered by US to keep Soviet rocket production busy and to avoid their migration to North Korea or Iran.
I've not heard this idea before. Why wouldn't US simply allow the Soviet rocket production to just die?
Please do you have a reference for it?
As I said they were afraid that North Korea or Iran will snatch their scientists.
So they paid Russians to develop an ISS module: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/element...
And they paid them to develop RD-180 engine: https://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/ac201/index.html
If you look it with modern history-rewriting lenses (e.g. what most people born after 1970 would have heard about) no.
At the time though, they did a heck of a lot of good basic research -- plus the whole "first man on space" thing.
Apparently the quantity of patents is also considered. Not the best metric either IMO
Around 50% or so of Russian PhD Dissertations are plagiarized.
Here’s your source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/...
Russia did a lot of innovation in the 1950’s - 1970’s. They then made two terrible decisions. One was to stop producing their own computer parts and steal from abroad, which worked at first but then it became harder to steal and reverse engineer than simply make themselves. The BESM-6 mainframe was an incredible computer, sad they didn’t continue working on it. Second was the move against the Jews in the 1970’s. Kind of ironic they didn’t learn the lesson of Hitler, lots of great future scientists left. Anyway this is why the Google founder Sergei Brin is now in the US. His father was Jewish and wanted to be a mathematician, but since he was a Jew he could only be a janitor.
>it became harder to steal and reverse engineer than simply make themselves.
That
The very same thing is with China these days I say from my first hand experience.
Here is one example from great many:
I once worked with Rapoo, a PC peripherals and cellphone accessories manufacturer. They had a guy who was a brilliant industrial designer. He authored ALL of Rapoo's Red Dot award winning products (and they have many.) The only problem with him was (or how it looked to company's managers) that he had no degree, and he was a vocational school grad. He first came to the company as an unpaid intern, and he then designed their first award winning product while still receiving no salary. That product was his first design work at the company. He singlehandedly made them known and distinguished from the sea of noname OEMs all making products that looks like half-used soap bars.
It took his extreme efforts just to get his design being chosen over a yet another boring one bought from product design sweatshop.
When it became news that it was his design that won the company fame, the reaction from managers was not encouragement, but disdain! It was only enough to get him hired full time on a measly salary. He continued to work and win awards for them.
After years without any recognition, he thought it was enough when it came to yet another design review where he had to defend his vision in front of bimboish mid-managers. Contending with his design was one from a recently hired mediocre Italian designer (hired for an astonishing salary of 50k CNY per month, while his was just 12k.) After hours of intense debates with the "jury," they were both told to "just to do it like that Apple style" for the reason "Apple style is expensive." That was the last drop for him.
The guy now lives a comfy life and enjoys a dream job in one idyllic Alpine country.
What I wanted to say here: just like Soviets killed their own computer industry out of their own sense of insecurity and fiery inferiority complex, Chinese industry alienates its best genuine talents by not being able to admit over insecurities of the affluent class that Chinese tech specialists can produce superior original works themselves.
If only even 1% of Chinese corporate functionaries had little bit more of believe in themselves, along with self-esteem and self-confidence. If they thought in a way where they don't think "there is no chance that we can do this better than foreigners" before even trying, Chinese industry would've been like nothing it is today.
> Around 50% or so of Russian PhD Dissertations are plagiarized.
Your "source" looks like a troll to me
While I can’t say if the percentage is correct it’s not that far off.
Both my parents were on their 2nd PhD in Russia in during that time (born 1942) both are Jewish the level of plagiarism in the academia was insane they had to enroll under non Jewish names to be even accepted were accused of plagiarism multiple times while some of their dissertations were not only plagiarized but effectively stolen.
It took my father probably an extra decade to get trough every thing PhD in biology and an MD simply because of the corruption in the academia where party favorites got preferential treatments and outcasts would have their exams lost recieve false penalties and if you happen to be Jewish often given tests which were designed to be impossible to pass.
It’s a serious article from the Washington Post?
Do you find the title serious? And how about the illustration? Did you ask yourself if this could possibly be a russian bashing wapo article by any chance?
It’s from 2014, before the Jeff Bezos acquisition and the current Russian collision investigation.
Regarding the Russian investigation, I agree with Glenn Greenewald that there is nothing there, and that the Democrats are in danger of becoming the HUAC of the 2020’s.
Also, in defense of Trump, I think he understands that the real danger is China, who fakes both the degrees AND the research. See this article:
- Fraud Scandals Sap China’s Dream of Becoming a Science Superpower https://nyti.ms/2kNc3Ez
I hope that adds more nuance to my post.
Many of the comments here show why critical thinking is a useful skill esp with articles such as this one, but given how much volume there is nowadays, and the fact that we are not all subject matter experts, it becomes a bit cumbersome.
I wish these articles had a "Ways in which our claim could be wrong" section. Maybe every article should. E.g. Here is what i think, but here are aspects of it that I haven't looked into that could make me change my stance.
At the very least, you'd know the author made some effort to be truthful, and not just sensationalist/misled.
Perhaps we can have a browser extension that aggregates and ranks crowdsourced feedback on articles such as this one? :P
It's also worth keeping in mind who this data/report for. Bloomberg has a specific audience, who love distilled information - that is doesn't capture the whole picture is a given, but who really has the time to do research themselves? That's why you pay Bloomberg.
But now with the internet, any rando can read this stuff and obsess over it.
Isn't that what the comments section of an article is ? Crowd sourced feedback ? The problem with crowd sourced feedback is that most of it is low effort/low quality trolling.
> South Korea remained the global-innovation gold medalist for the fifth consecutive year. Samsung Electronics Co., the nation’s most-valuable company by market capitalization, has received more U.S. patents in the 2000s than any firm except International Business Machines Corp.
OK this is hilariously misguided as a metric. Also, I have some familiarity with the SK tech industry. They're catching up to US standards and hold themselves back by prioritizing the old-school mechanisms for upward movement which hinge on seniority/age and pedigree.
Every time I see a ranking like this, I think: wow, what a crap ranking.
Innovation has relatively little to do with nation-states. It has quite a lot to do with city-regions, however: those, much more than nation-states, are what produce the social and economic dynamism that fuels innovation.
What the Bloomberg and other similar metrics do is take real indicators of innovation and then averages them across randomly-sized buckets, making it genuinely useless for comparative purposes. Singapore fares very well because it's a city-state. China fares very poorly because it has three-quarters of a billion people who aren't doing anything particularly from an innovation perspective. America has the same "problem" on a smaller scale. But innovative places like Shenzhen or the SF Bay Area can approach Singaporean levels of innovation, while China and America's innovation output as a whole certainly outdo Singapore's.
So this ranking is showing neither the total innovation output of a country, nor the "innovation density" of places where innovators actually congregate. So what is it showing? Basically nothing.
(This is not to dispute the thesis that America, as a whole, is having national-scale problems with how it fosters innovation. Personally I agree with that, but would not use this garbage metric to try to support that thesis.)
This deserves to be on top. Cities and metropolitan regions are what is driving innovation and the economy.
Part of the problem, money is flowing more towards sinks like "Social Influencers", "V-loggers" and other similar jobs. Younger generation is focusing more on instant fame/money/reward/acknowledgement than investing in long term initiatives like pursuing STEM based programs. Sadly we live in a time where a 15 year old is making more money posting his/her pictures than someone holding a Phd. Forget about academia jobs there are no more jobs in post-docs positions in USA anymore.
Is that really any different than kids going to college for kinesiology just to play football? There's a huge education problem in the United States, and it has existed long before the advent of the vlogger.
The entertainment industry has always had pop culture icons making more than skilled-professionals. Are you getting social media confused with companies who innovate just because they both use computers?
Agree that people in entertainment always making more money than skilled-professionals. But my point is that younger demographic is heavily influenced by current social-media-preneurs rater than STEM achievers.
That's nothing new. Sports, acting, and music attracted a huge fraction of young Baby Boomers and GenXers.
> The entertainment industry has always had pop culture icons making more than skilled-professionals.
And vast hordes, often indistinguishable but for luck, making far less. But they are less visible, inherently.
How much actual money is flowing towards social influencers and vloggers?
It's all just advertising. Print advertising is dead (hyperbole), replaced by social advertising.
Is # of patent applications really a criteria in innovation? Seems to value quantity over quality.
Well, that also creates a further negative effect toward the "Patent Troll" system prevalent in the US.[0]
quantity of patents is measurable, but how would you measure the originality of the patents? Patents can be cited, one way would be to measure the number of citations - but here it says that this is a feature of US patents only https://www.quora.com/Why-do-patents-cite-other-patents Is there another possible way to measure the impact of a patent that could apply to all national patent offices?
An "innovation" ranking that doesn't have the U.S. in the top 10 is like a ranking of U.S. universities that doesn't have Harvard or Stanford in the top 10. It says more about the ranking methodology than what is being ranked.
Wait, you don't think Finland produces radically more innovation than the US?
I mean comeon, everything about CRISPR, AI, VR/AR, automation, mobile software, Internet software, Internet services, media technology, space tech, biotech, military tech, video gaming, it's all pouring out of Finland at a far higher rate than the US.
I'll say that Finland is very obviously a wonderful country on most metrics. No question about that at all. They aren't even remotely in the same league as the US on innovation or invention. It's the same exact bullshit you run into when people compare Sweden vs the US, it makes no sense on scale. For the same reason, comparing Finland to the US on innovation, is an absurdity, a nation of 5 million vs a nation of 330 million. You could compare Massachusetts to Finland perhaps, or Sweden. The US should be compared against larger entities (EU, Eurozone, Germany, France, China, Japan, Russia, etc.), or otherwise assessed at the state level of elite outcomes vs small nation elite outcomes. There's just as large of a gap between Massachusetts and Louisiana, as there is Sweden and Romania.
The US appear to rank highly in the "opinion of themselves" category /s
Just to be clear: yes, most rankings are BS all the way, but thinking about what role the US (or any country, really) plays in innovation/education/economy/$thing seems worthwhile?
Still, is it just me, or are the most posts here reflex-like defenses of the US?
What would you suggest instead? It would have to yield actionable results, mind you...
“One common trait of the U.S., Korea and China is that people accept failure as part of the process,”
I don't think that's true about Korea, and it is the core reason for the lack of vibrant startups in Korea.
I don't fully understand why with the best universities and the best startups, the U.S. is not number one. Of course, it's a big country with not only tech companies in the economy, that seems counterintuitive to include this in the calculation though.
I'm quite sure this goes in hand with the poor education that the U.S provides.
When we talk about Big Tech, meaning the dominant high-tech companies, we mean Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They are the ones doing things that affect our lives, which is what we actually care about. All five are headquartered in the US. That means the US is tops in the sort of innovation that we actually care about. Any "Innovation Index" that doesn't place the US at or very close to the top is not a useful proxy for impactful innovation.
I mean, sure, it's feasible that Israel unseated the US at no. 10, but also the US gives Israel tens of billions of dollars in support.
Well, I'm not sure this is fair. From what I can see in the rankings, they're size/population independent. So in absolute terms, the US is probably ahead in "innovation". But in relative terms, no, which might be more interesting if you're looking for a place to send your kids to university or whatever. Plus Israel has a huge number of tech companies, with really smart people (in my experience). Money is one thing, culture is another. With that in mind, I don't think it shocks anybody to hear the US education system is letting people down...
> but also the US gives Israel tens of billions of dollars in support.
Is this really $3B/y of military aid for buying weapons from US?
I don't know if you're American but wouldn't it then be reasonable to say that the idea of supporting Israel with billions of dollars was America's own idea that it has to take responsibility for? The US is free to spend its money and political power in any way it wants and will take the consequences for it.
Don't other nations also receive much aid from US but score low in this ranking?
Yeah but most other nations receive hundreds of millions of dollars and it's mostly africa and middle eastern countries. US is planning to spend 1.3 trillion in Israel in FY18, although I imagine most of that is military.
No denying Israel is a leader in innovation because they absolutely are, but the headline seems to imply that they unseated the US, which is kind of misleading.
>US is planning to spend 1.3 trillion in Israel in FY18
That isn't what your source says... where'd you get that number?
[0]: https://www.foreignassistance.gov/explore/country/Israel
On the homepage when you hover over, but say it's $3.1B (the number doesn't really matter because it's impossible to gauge how much goes to military spending)
>U.S. assistance helps ensure that Israel maintains its Qualitative Military Edge (QME) over potential regional threats, preventing a shift in the security balance of the region and safeguarding U.S. interests.
My argument here is that the US is outsourcing innovation to countries like Israel rather than investing in it domestically. This likely serves to kill 2 birds with one stone but it makes it weird to index the 2 countries against each other.
> "it's impossible to gauge how much goes to military spending"
It is easy to gauge how much goes to military spending. Practically all of it if we go by previous years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_aid_to_Israel.gif
And of that military spending, IIRC >=50% is only allowed to be spent on purchasing from US companies (i.e. driving US military innovation) and IIUC from 2019 onwards that percentage will go up to 100%, so it will primarily drive US military innovation (and at the same time discourage Israeli military innovation, since the Israeli government will be less likely to spend money on local military products)
The difference between 3.1B and 1300B dollars is significant and it is bizarre that you cite a source and then say "the number doesn't really matter". The number definitely does matter...
The number you initially claimed in spite of your own source contravening it would support your argument... if one was moving 1300B from a 18620B economy to a 317B economy... that is to say, providing support equal to 400% of the recipient's GDP, that would be significant.
The actual numbers given in the source you provided are insignificant and don't support your argument.
US fell from 9th to 11th and Israel was 10th and remained 10th.
Reminds me of this interview of Mariana Mazzucato on "The green innovation race" which I revisited in light of the new tariffs on solar panels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hygM6nJFXa0
Bad ideology is dragging us down.