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The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

bloomberg.com

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Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#71

Post by gandhium »

dvdhnt wrote: post #5
virmundi wrote: post #2

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…

3 scientists from country with population ~200 million and during 70 years period?

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#72

Post by muninn_ »

ddebernardy wrote: post #63
notatoad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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"

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#73

Post by virmundi »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #66
virmundi wrote: post #58

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.

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.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#74

Post by phillc73 »

defertoreptar wrote: post #67
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#75

Post by gandhium »

FRex wrote: post #48
cryptonector wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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…

> 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.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#76

Post by gandhium »

digikata wrote: post #49
pimmen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 E…

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.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#79

Post by CandidlyFake »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #45
martinshen wrote: post #6

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.

Re: The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking

#80

Post by logfromblammo »

tlb wrote: post #8

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…

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.

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