131–140 of 143 posts
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...
What 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…
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.
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.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "reputab…
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 tak…
A robot does not innovate upon its expertise estate.
What 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 inn…
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 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.
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-…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The EU is a confederation. They need to be considered as a block now. Don't look at Germany. Look at the EU.
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…
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/...
