Why the United States has the best research universities

Again...personal experience but I can speak to this a bit.

I went to an undergraduate university that would be wouldn't be considered highly ranked, but was nationally known in one subfield. I remember being surprised at one point to see a number of articles in major science media sources from MIT about a 'breakthrough'. I read the articles and they were 100% describing something that we did on a regular basis in undergraduate labs. I read the underlying press release and the underlying paper and was decidedly meh but man did it catch a news wave. I've always attributed it to being from MIT more so than truly novel. Not a shot against them...just an observation of the power of self-perpetuating narratives.

I now work at a different internationally ranked 'best researchy type' university. The research is better for a lot of reasons. The ability to attract the best people helps, but that comes from the reputation of having the best people and the resources to attract the best people. That is intermingled with the resources to have support, PR, media relations, and the brand name attraction for grad students.

We have pretty much the same distribution of undergrad intellect as other engineering schools I have worked with. It skew more academic and less practical...I'll be honest if I was a VC I would look at other universities for the next founder types. But the resources and money available for students to pursue entrepreneurship are outsized compared to the talent.

But the myths about our excellence are pervasive - and drive behaviors from people who have no basis for actual evidence. It means we get students brand shopping and not wanting to do the work (we literally had a case of an international student being expelled for the person in classes not actually being the enrolled student).

I don't think this article is wrong per se but the virtuous circle argument is inseparable from the self-perpetuating circle one. And I am unsurprised that the American Economic Association isn't talking about that piece. Objective functions are great, feedback loops are also an element of a control system.

> They’re overwhelmingly US-based. Fields, Nobel, Turing, etc

This isn't really clear. For example, EU has generated about twice the fields medal recipients as the US. That's reasonable in terms of roughly equivalent populations, but does beg the question that if someone grows up in Europe, trains and spends early career in Europe, but ends up a professor in USA before being given a Nobel prize, where do you count the result?

Yes, most U.S. universities require a broad range of subjects outside of one's chosen major. This is a good thing in my book. You have your whole life to develop an ever-narrowing level of specialization.

Klarna, Revolut, and Hellofresh (German founding I believe) immediately pop to mind but I'm sure there are more if I did some searching.

The recent trips to Europe I have been so intrigued by how different the apps people use for many common commercial tasks are to the ones I use at home. I'm assuming there are logistical, cultural, or compliance reasons at play but I can't speak to it.

Pretty much. Their main geopolitical rivals in Europe imploded thanks to WWI and WWII. Had Europe not levelled itself, the USA likely would never have caught up in terms of economic superiority, and the USA would've remained a strongly isolationist middle power.

(Now keep in mind that the prospect of a peaceful 20th century Europe is unrealistic. Europe was a warring tinderbox at the time, and even if WWI and WWII had not happened, a conflict of similar scale likely would've broken out in Europe regardless. Any number of destructive conflicts could've broken out, including a Soviet invasion of Germany and Western Europe. In short, it's really hard to construct a timeline where the USA wouldn't have been catapulted into superpower status due to war in Europe)