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The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking
- virmundi 9y agoIs the metric for most stem masters or phds useful? The Soviet Union use to produce many such people but never achieved much.
- zakk 9y agoThey beat the US in sending the first man to space. Saying that “they never achieved much” is a gigantic understatement!!
- CamperBob2 9y agoAnd 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.
- adventured 9y agoPretty 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.
- Bendingo 9y agoRides 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-russian-lng/ https://www.rt.com/business/415345-united-states-buying-russ... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/how-the-u-s-almost-bought-russian-natural-gas-quicktake-q-a https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/how-the-u...
- virmundi 9y agoFair 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?
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoInnovation and economic success are not the same thing.
- virmundi 9y agoWhile not necessarily so, they do seem to have are strong causal relationship. The more innovative an economy, the more economic freedom it has.
- Bendingo 9y agoAnd also sent first woman to space. First dog(s) too. First orbiting spacecraft etc.
- jrs95 9y agoApparently the quantity of patents is also considered. Not the best metric either IMO
- dvdhnt 9y agoI 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_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_the_... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation#_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation... edit: formatting
- cryptonector 9y agoBut 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.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> 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”.
- abakker 9y agoThat 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.
- coldtea 9y agoIf 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.
- Bucephalus355 9y agoAround 50% or so of Russian PhD Dissertations are plagiarized. Here’s your source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/18/russias-plagiarism-problem-even-putin-has-done-it/ 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.
- vidoc 9y ago> Around 50% or so of Russian PhD Dissertations are plagiarized. Your "source" looks like a troll to me
- Bucephalus355 9y agoIt’s a serious article from the Washington Post?
- vidoc 9y agoDo 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?
- Bucephalus355 9y agoIt’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 https://nyti.ms/2kNc3Ez I hope that adds more nuance to my post.
- FRex 9y agoThe 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.
- pimmen 9y agoAnd 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.
- digikata 9y agoIronically 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-180_engine_on_US_Atlas_launch_vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180#Replacement_for_the_RD-...
- gandhium 9y agoYes, 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.
- martinshen 9y agoHonestly 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.
- nkassis 9y agoYour 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.
- fauigerzigerk 9y ago>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.
- virmundi 9y agoThe EU is a confederation. They need to be considered as a block now. Don't look at Germany. Look at the EU.
- fauigerzigerk 9y agoI can't. There are tons of EU countries missing from this list.
- virmundi 9y agoThey 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.
- tlb 9y agoWhat 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- electrograv 9y agoWhen 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".
- rxhernandez 9y agoYou 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.
- creaghpatr 9y agoI 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.
- dba7dba 9y agoDon't other nations also receive much aid from US but score low in this ranking?
- creaghpatr 9y agoYeah 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. https://www.foreignassistance.gov/explore https://www.foreignassistance.gov/explore
- fishcolorbrick 9y ago>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 https://www.foreignassistance.gov/explore/country/Israel
- creaghpatr 9y agoOn 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.
- CodeSheikh 9y agoPart 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.
- panopticon 9y agoIs 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.
- balthasar 9y agoThe 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?
- CodeSheikh 9y agoAgree 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.
- leereeves 9y agoThat's nothing new. Sports, acting, and music attracted a huge fraction of young Baby Boomers and GenXers.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> 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.
- blahman2 9y agoMany 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
- lnreddy 9y agoIsn'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.
- guitarbill 9y agoIt'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.
- cromwellian 9y agoIs # of patent applications really a criteria in innovation? Seems to value quantity over quality.
- FilterSweep 9y agoWell, that also creates a further negative effect toward the "Patent Troll" system prevalent in the US.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
- MichaelMoser123 9y agoquantity 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 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?
- nofilter 9y agoI'm quite sure this goes in hand with the poor education that the U.S provides.
- ryandrake 9y agoThe 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?
- notyourwork 9y agoBeing 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.
- WillReplyfFood 9y agoIf one wants to improve something, one nees a little self-sadism, the wish to shine a light on the ugly spots until things improve.
- hartator 9y agoI 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.
- rayiner 9y agoAn "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.
- adventured 9y agoWait, 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.
- chmod775 9y agoThe US appear to rank highly in the "opinion of themselves" category /s
- davidf18 9y agoThe truth is that innovators from all over the world come to the USA to follow their dream -- be it in technology, fashion, media. I live in NYC and meet a number of people from all over the world that want to work in the exciting environment of NYC. Russian ballet dancers come to NYC. French fashion designers come to NYC. Israeli and other tech innovators come to NYC or go to SV. So many young innovators from all over the world come to NYC, SV, Boston, and a few other places, that we may risk a "brain drain" from developed and low-income countries alike.
- yangtheman 9y ago“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.
- banachtarski 9y ago> 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.
- seoguru 9y agoReminds 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hygM6nJFXa0 Bad ideology is dragging us down.
- theother 9y agoJust 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...
- nkoren 9y agoEvery 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.)
- purplethinking 9y agoThis deserves to be on top. Cities and metropolitan regions are what is driving innovation and the economy.
- johan_larson 9y agoWhen 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.