Europe Does Well in Innovation
This analysis is abysmal, the sort of quality I&#x27;d expect from the Guardian, and I&#x27;m not even American. It&#x27;s mostly useful as a case study of how openly ideological Bloomberg has become. I can read it as I apparently have some sort of free article quota, so here are the lowlights.<p>Firstly, the USA is not even in the top 10. Really? Any function that purports to rank countries and not peoples will inevitably place the most populated countries near the top. If that doesn&#x27;t happen it means they&#x27;re really trying to rank Americans vs the Swiss vs the Chinese vs the Koreans, but presumably that would sound racist, so they don&#x27;t admit that. Moreover this doesn&#x27;t seem to pass a basic reality check: if someone comes up with a ranking function for countries in innovation and the USA isn&#x27;t even in the top 10 then my first reaction is &quot;your criteria are probably buggy, please double check that&quot;. We&#x27;re talking about the country of rockets that land themselves, cutting edge AI research, self driving cars. They conclude none of this counts because they are redefining the word innovation. Their new definition is unclear and the article switches between multiple very different meanings throughout.<p><i>“Innovation is often measured by new ideas, new products and new services,” she said, but it’s their “diffusion and adoption” that is the real metric of success.</i><p>Defining innovation in the way people would expect would seem to be a basic requirement for any sort of rigorous analysis. In this paragraph it means commercial success. Most would agree that you can be innovative without being successful, in fact &quot;the better tech doesn&#x27;t always win&quot; is folk wisdom by now. Their re-definition doesn&#x27;t stop there:<p><i>“We should recognize that the available metrics miss important dimensions of innovation,” said Romer, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “Officials in Wuhan showed for the first time that in a couple of weeks, it is feasible to test 10 million residents of a city for coronavirus. This was a very important public health innovation.”</i><p>Welding people in their houses and forcing them to undergo medical testing is not &quot;innovation&quot; by any kind of definition a normal person would use. Anyone could come up with that idea. All it proves is that the Wuhan government - assuming their reports can be trusted - is willing to do whatever it takes to enforce its policies at high speed. This is an especially poor example of innovation because doctors are trained to <i>not</i> do blanket mass testing of entire populations due to the problem of false positives, and China had no innovation solution to that: they just ignored it.<p><i>Korea’s return to the top spot is mainly due to an increase in patent activity, where it ranks top</i><p>If patent activity were a good proxy for innovation then IBM would be the world&#x27;s top tech firm. Anyone who has done R&amp;D knows the patent system is awash with garbage patents.<p><i>As the two biggest economies, the U.S. and China account for much of the world’s innovation</i><p>Here they switch their definition of innovation again, and the article is by now internally inconsistent: US and China account for &quot;much&quot; of the world&#x27;s innovation yet neither are in the top 10 most innovative countries. By the end of the article it&#x27;s become openly politically biased:<p><i>The country scores badly in higher education, even though U.S. universities are world-famous. That underperformance was likely made worse by obstacles to foreign students, who are usually prominent in science and technology classes -- first due to the Trump administration’s visa policies, and later to the pandemic. New President Joe Biden ran on a promise to reinvigorate U.S. manufacturing with a $300 billion investment in R&amp;D and breakthrough technologies, a policy he labeled Innovate in America.</i><p>Innovation is now about how many foreign students you take in, the US being downranked is all Trump&#x27;s fault, then innovation becomes about how much manufacturing you do and Biden is going to fix it with state control of the economy.<p><i>Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, says the U.S. is still in the vanguard –- but nowadays its innovations tend to come from smaller companies, and take longer to reach the consumer. “There are a lot of new ideas from many start-ups,” he said. “It will take time for the ideas to be translated into marketable products.”</i><p>Back to commercial success again. Anyone familiar with the history of the world&#x27;s biggest tech firms will see a common recurring pattern:<p>• They are mostly founded by Americans. The most famous immigrant tech founders are Sergey Brin (but he did it with American Larry Page, and immigrated as a child), and Elon Musk.<p>• They very frequently drop out of university to found their business.<p>It&#x27;s very hard to read all those stories and reach a conclusion that university education for immigrants is the key to innovation success in the world, given how many tech firms are created by Americans who abandoned their education before finishing it.