7 ms·

Europe Does Well in Innovation

56 points by hheikinh 6y ago

PestoDiRucola 6y ago
Does it really matter for as long as the US has the economical power to import talent (and purchase innovation) as needed not only from Europe but the whole world?
- jmeister 6y ago
  The subtext for this article is the general pessimism about post-Brexit Europe these days: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/28/i-hate-to-say-it-but-britains-doing-ok-even-germany-envies-us https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/28/i-hate-to-s... https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-puzzle-of-europe.html https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-puzzle-of-eur...
  - toyg 6y ago
    How can I take seriously a piece that opens comparing China and Italy? It’s like comparing the US with San Marino, or Russia with Minnesota. It’s not 1955 anymore, it’s time to compare (continental superpower) apples to (continental superpower) apples.
    - irrational 6y ago
      It’s not clear to me why you are being downvoted. Maybe HN Italians are longing for the glory days of the Roman Empire? Make Rome Great Again.
- vmception 6y ago
  Well the first country in Europe on that list was Switzerland with 3rd place. It is a steep bell curve from there, but Switzerland is an order of magnitude more competitive than the neighboring countries and they already do import talent, more easily from Europe but also the whole world. I don't know man, its not an ego thing. The structure of Switzerland makes it easy to do business. If you think of it like a tiny-USA except with a tiny-Federal government and even tinier states (cantons), all surrounded by the European Union maybe it makes sense, or maybe everyone would still lack context for what ways that comparison would hold. Switzerland is more like a conglomerate with each component all using the same unquestionable brand with the name "Switzerland", and the board stays out of how the conglomerate's units do anything. So for regulations - or making/finding favorable regulations - you really have something like 26 unquestionable Switzerlands without really ever needing to worry about a federal government's overarching restrictions. These 26 cantons also have very tiny populations, so the regulator could just be there waiting to be noticed and will gladly do something competitive for you. Switzerland has competence combined with a collaborative non-adversarial relationship between the government and people. That combination doesn't really exist elsewhere, you might have competence in Germany or competence in Cayman Islands, but it will be adversarial. You might have a lack of competence in an individual United State or federal agency, and you will have an adversarial relationship where you are mostly trying not to be noticed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  I think this has been a thing for decades. The US focuses on economical power above all, so can always afford to import talent. They have far more spending power than countries which spend their resources, for example, feeding people, providing healthcare, etc.
- rapsey 6y ago
  That economical power can be gone in an instant if the US dollar ceases to be the worlds reserve currency. An economic crisis could thus literally bring the US to it's knees. Without the dollar being overvalued as it is, the US ceases to function as an economy.
  - EdwinLarkin 6y ago
    I keep hearing this all the time and it never happens. The US is also recovering much faster from this pandemic than the EU.
    - rapsey 6y ago
      Because changing the worlds reserve currency is at most a once in a century event. Just because people are warning that it can happen, or that it is headed that way does not mean it will happen tomorrow. The US has exorbitant privilege in the world stage. It got this privilege by it's economic strength and military. Now it is slowly hollowing it out.
Dma54rhs 6y ago
Unfortunately I can't see that index because of paywall. Unfortunately my personal experience here is while I do see innovation here, when it comes to making the money all the companies run to America where the capital is or at best Germany where manufacturing is.
- rwoerz 6y ago
  Where is "here"?
maxrobot 6y ago
The title on HN is a bit misleading since the Bloomberg link has the title 'South Korea Leads World in Innovation as U.S. Exits Top Ten'...
- wyuenho 6y ago
  An account with 14 karma posting a link with a misleading title and went on the front page by appealing to confirmation biases in certain timezones. How does this get past HN?
  - Shish2k 6y ago
    Not sure if this is sarcasm or not - just because HN is full of nerds, doesn’t stop us from being just as vulnerable to clickbait and confirmation bias as anybody else :)
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  And below it: Seven of top 10 places go to European countries; China slips
jjjeii3 6y ago
Don't trust anything Bloomberg says. They have zero credibility. For example, they stated many times that all major companies like Google, Amazon and Apple have hardware from SuperMicro Inc., that contains hidden microchips and can spy on the companies by sending data to China... It was proven later that this was fake news. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermicro#Allegations_of_compromised_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermicro#Allegations_of_comp...
- esperent 6y ago
  It's pretty hard to form an opinion from reading the wiki page - it basically boils down to "Bloomberg says X about Supermicro, Supermicro and some other companies deny it".
Lio 6y ago
Does anyone have an actual free link to the list? I was surprised not to see it in an article referring to it. Is the article just an advert for Bloomberg’s subscription services? Also auto-playing video is a bit obnoxious.
- blacktulip 6y ago
  A browser extension to bypass paywalls: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
jjjeii3 6y ago
Number of patents registered in the EU 2019: 180.000 Number of patents registered in US 2019: 669.000
- frereubu 6y ago
  Third sentence in the article: "The Bloomberg index analyzes dozens of criteria using seven equally weighted metrics, including research and development spending, manufacturing capability and concentration of high-tech public companies."
- guiriduro 6y ago
  innovation != patents
- rpadovani 6y ago
  This is like counting the number of commits to check the health status of a project
- blueblisters 6y ago
  IBM used to (still does?) measure innovation and research success in total number of patents it holds. It's one of those misaligned incentives that are good for marketing and self-congratulating but rarely translate into actual leadership in business or technology.
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  Innovation is still innovation even if nobody holds a monopoly on it.
- lamp987 6y ago
  this better be b8
dependsontheq 6y ago
It's complicated. There are some factors that make any such comparisons very difficult, the EU is a complicated political entity uniting nearly 30 different cultures. That is a stunning achievement. It's also not really one market, in many ways it is but to actually sell something in all member countries I need to adapt to at least 20 different markets. There are the new eastern european members who actually often have difficult political problems, there are old members like Italy with ridiculous political problems (it's not the EUs fault that founding a company or taking another company to court takes ages in Italy). It's also a rapidly aging continent, that makes a comparison to the US difficult. Sure some things are stupid, sure the EU is bureaucratic (but I always wonder how a common market with 30 countries can be done any other way), sure it's slow (how could it be any way else), but it represents more than 400 million people trying to build a shared future. And it's the only example of something like that in human history. Look how good the relationship with between the US and Mexico works, the way the US structures its relationship (guns, border walls) is mostly responsible for an insane drug war. Look how China structures it's relationship with it's neighbors. I think it's highly likely that most neighboring countries will join the EU step by step, ant the EU will adapt change, become more effective, less effective. But it's hard to compare such a unique human experiment with anything.
- emilsedgh 6y ago
  Here is something irrelevant to the original post but relevant to your comment: I'd have a 50 year bet that Russia will join the EU. From a cultural perspective, many eastern European countries have Russian roots and will make the transition smoother. From a geopolitical perspective, neither have a choice. Both need to be able to compete with China and U.S. in terms of economy.
  - d3ckard 6y ago
    Which countries have Russian roots? I'm not aware of any.
    - lou1306 6y ago
      Although not an EU country, Serbia would be the best example. However, I would say "Russian ties" rather than "Russian roots". For instance, they both are Slavic, Orthodox countries, and have been historically allied.
thu2111 6y ago
This analysis is abysmal, the sort of quality I'd expect from the Guardian, and I'm not even American. It'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. 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't happen it means they're really trying to rank Americans vs the Swiss vs the Chinese vs the Koreans, but presumably that would sound racist, so they don't admit that. Moreover this doesn't seem to pass a basic reality check: if someone comes up with a ranking function for countries in innovation and the USA isn't even in the top 10 then my first reaction is "your criteria are probably buggy, please double check that". We'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. “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. 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 "the better tech doesn't always win" is folk wisdom by now. Their re-definition doesn't stop there: “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.” Welding people in their houses and forcing them to undergo medical testing is not "innovation" 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 not 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. Korea’s return to the top spot is mainly due to an increase in patent activity, where it ranks top If patent activity were a good proxy for innovation then IBM would be the world's top tech firm. Anyone who has done R&D knows the patent system is awash with garbage patents. As the two biggest economies, the U.S. and China account for much of the world’s innovation Here they switch their definition of innovation again, and the article is by now internally inconsistent: US and China account for "much" of the world's innovation yet neither are in the top 10 most innovative countries. By the end of the article it's become openly politically biased: 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&D and breakthrough technologies, a policy he labeled Innovate in America. Innovation is now about how many foreign students you take in, the US being downranked is all Trump's fault, then innovation becomes about how much manufacturing you do and Biden is going to fix it with state control of the economy. 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.” Back to commercial success again. Anyone familiar with the history of the world's biggest tech firms will see a common recurring pattern: • 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. • They very frequently drop out of university to found their business. It'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.
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
Europe does well to keep talents in relative poverty compared to our peers in the US. Most IT people are in the 50-60k/pa bracket.Some are in 80k and anything > 100k/pa is an exception. And this is usually with progressive taxation starting with 30% and going upwards. Most of the good housing costs > 400k and we are talking small apartments because it's Europe and if you live in the suburbs you give up all the great infrastructure. Moving around in Europe is a nightmare especially if your spouse is in a field that requires intermediate/native level of the local language.
- enriquto 6y ago
  Are you joking? 50k is not "relative poverty" by any definition.
  - dijit 6y ago
    This is such a complicated topic that it's hard to make generalisations that apply in all cases. The US is similar to Europe in that standards can be wildly different between states/countries. 50k EUR in Estonia is a lot different to 50k in Sweden. But I would say, on average, that the difference is that it's cheaper to have a good life in Europe. If you earn 50k in Sweden, it would roughly give me the same QoL as a person living on 150k in NYC (or 80k in London!), and if I earned 60k in Sweden then it would feel roughly the same as 200k in NYC, because the costs don't scale linearly. But the difference between me, an IT professional on a "good" wage (which, actually does feel like a good wage btw) and a Waitress at a restaurant is not so incredibly vast as to make sure that the waitress lives in perpetual poverty. The gap is smaller and because of it the wealth feels attainable and people are a bit more content. Contentedness is far better than the "dollar amount" of capital you have, wealth is feeling good about your life, some people conflate the fact that it costs a lot of money to feel content and secure in the USA with the rest of the world. I've lived in Finland, Sweden, Estonia and I was raised in the UK. Income equality has a long way to go in the UK, so what I say does not apply there at all.
    - distances 6y ago
      I see you're hopping the Nordic countries. How similar are they in reality? Is it fair to place all them in the same bucket as always is done in these discussions? What made you move from one to another?
RGamma 6y ago
Ugh another one of these "we take highly complex systems, a fuzzy property, some questionable proxies (number of patents lol) to measure it by and we compress it into a one-dimensional ranking" Oversimplification at best, make-believe at worst, especially since there are economists involved who in my book aren't exactly known for methodological rigor. You know, there might be some truth in this in say that that the top third is on average more innovative than the bottom third or something like that, but without in-depth justification you just can't know, so this is simply economist fantasy?
dragonelite 6y ago
Im a bit skeptical about rankings by western nations, given the last year. That most prepared for a pandemic ranking picture has pretty much become a meme right now.
known 6y ago
mRNA vaccines were rolled out by USA and Germany :)
orange_tee 6y ago
Maybe the disconnect here is that they are talking about "innovation" but not necessarily profitable innovation. There's also something to be said about the kind of innovation that disrupts a whole market, and the kind of innovation that incrementally improves on some process or tool. Maybe another question would be, is there enough of the latter kind of innovation to make up (economically) for the lack of unicorns?
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Unicorns are a net negative to the world. Uber isn’t even a business for example. It is using invested money to make taxis cheaper. That’s not innovative or even a business.

56 points by hheikinh 6y ago

Does it really matter for as long as the US has the economical power to import talent (and purchase innovation) as needed not only from Europe but the whole world?

jmeister 6y ago
The subtext for this article is the general pessimism about post-Brexit Europe these days: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/28/i-hate-to-say-it-but-britains-doing-ok-even-germany-envies-us https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/28/i-hate-to-s... https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-puzzle-of-europe.html https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-puzzle-of-eur...
- toyg 6y ago
  How can I take seriously a piece that opens comparing China and Italy? It’s like comparing the US with San Marino, or Russia with Minnesota. It’s not 1955 anymore, it’s time to compare (continental superpower) apples to (continental superpower) apples.
  - irrational 6y ago
    It’s not clear to me why you are being downvoted. Maybe HN Italians are longing for the glory days of the Roman Empire? Make Rome Great Again.
vmception 6y ago
Well the first country in Europe on that list was Switzerland with 3rd place. It is a steep bell curve from there, but Switzerland is an order of magnitude more competitive than the neighboring countries and they already do import talent, more easily from Europe but also the whole world. I don't know man, its not an ego thing. The structure of Switzerland makes it easy to do business. If you think of it like a tiny-USA except with a tiny-Federal government and even tinier states (cantons), all surrounded by the European Union maybe it makes sense, or maybe everyone would still lack context for what ways that comparison would hold. Switzerland is more like a conglomerate with each component all using the same unquestionable brand with the name "Switzerland", and the board stays out of how the conglomerate's units do anything. So for regulations - or making/finding favorable regulations - you really have something like 26 unquestionable Switzerlands without really ever needing to worry about a federal government's overarching restrictions. These 26 cantons also have very tiny populations, so the regulator could just be there waiting to be noticed and will gladly do something competitive for you. Switzerland has competence combined with a collaborative non-adversarial relationship between the government and people. That combination doesn't really exist elsewhere, you might have competence in Germany or competence in Cayman Islands, but it will be adversarial. You might have a lack of competence in an individual United State or federal agency, and you will have an adversarial relationship where you are mostly trying not to be noticed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
WhyNotHugo 6y ago
I think this has been a thing for decades. The US focuses on economical power above all, so can always afford to import talent. They have far more spending power than countries which spend their resources, for example, feeding people, providing healthcare, etc.
rapsey 6y ago
That economical power can be gone in an instant if the US dollar ceases to be the worlds reserve currency. An economic crisis could thus literally bring the US to it's knees. Without the dollar being overvalued as it is, the US ceases to function as an economy.
- EdwinLarkin 6y ago
  I keep hearing this all the time and it never happens. The US is also recovering much faster from this pandemic than the EU.
  - rapsey 6y ago
    Because changing the worlds reserve currency is at most a once in a century event. Just because people are warning that it can happen, or that it is headed that way does not mean it will happen tomorrow. The US has exorbitant privilege in the world stage. It got this privilege by it's economic strength and military. Now it is slowly hollowing it out.

Dma54rhs 6y ago

Unfortunately I can't see that index because of paywall. Unfortunately my personal experience here is while I do see innovation here, when it comes to making the money all the companies run to America where the capital is or at best Germany where manufacturing is.

rwoerz 6y ago
Where is "here"?

maxrobot 6y ago

The title on HN is a bit misleading since the Bloomberg link has the title 'South Korea Leads World in Innovation as U.S. Exits Top Ten'...

wyuenho 6y ago
An account with 14 karma posting a link with a misleading title and went on the front page by appealing to confirmation biases in certain timezones. How does this get past HN?
- Shish2k 6y ago
  Not sure if this is sarcasm or not - just because HN is full of nerds, doesn’t stop us from being just as vulnerable to clickbait and confirmation bias as anybody else :)
NicoJuicy 6y ago
And below it: Seven of top 10 places go to European countries; China slips

jjjeii3 6y ago

Don't trust anything Bloomberg says. They have zero credibility. For example, they stated many times that all major companies like Google, Amazon and Apple have hardware from SuperMicro Inc., that contains hidden microchips and can spy on the companies by sending data to China... It was proven later that this was fake news. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermicro#Allegations_of_compromised_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermicro#Allegations_of_comp...

esperent 6y ago
It's pretty hard to form an opinion from reading the wiki page - it basically boils down to "Bloomberg says X about Supermicro, Supermicro and some other companies deny it".

Lio 6y ago

Does anyone have an actual free link to the list? I was surprised not to see it in an article referring to it. Is the article just an advert for Bloomberg’s subscription services? Also auto-playing video is a bit obnoxious.

blacktulip 6y ago
A browser extension to bypass paywalls: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

jjjeii3 6y ago

Number of patents registered in the EU 2019: 180.000 Number of patents registered in US 2019: 669.000

frereubu 6y ago
Third sentence in the article: "The Bloomberg index analyzes dozens of criteria using seven equally weighted metrics, including research and development spending, manufacturing capability and concentration of high-tech public companies."
guiriduro 6y ago
innovation != patents
rpadovani 6y ago
This is like counting the number of commits to check the health status of a project
blueblisters 6y ago
IBM used to (still does?) measure innovation and research success in total number of patents it holds. It's one of those misaligned incentives that are good for marketing and self-congratulating but rarely translate into actual leadership in business or technology.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
Innovation is still innovation even if nobody holds a monopoly on it.
lamp987 6y ago
this better be b8

dependsontheq 6y ago

It's complicated. There are some factors that make any such comparisons very difficult, the EU is a complicated political entity uniting nearly 30 different cultures. That is a stunning achievement. It's also not really one market, in many ways it is but to actually sell something in all member countries I need to adapt to at least 20 different markets. There are the new eastern european members who actually often have difficult political problems, there are old members like Italy with ridiculous political problems (it's not the EUs fault that founding a company or taking another company to court takes ages in Italy). It's also a rapidly aging continent, that makes a comparison to the US difficult. Sure some things are stupid, sure the EU is bureaucratic (but I always wonder how a common market with 30 countries can be done any other way), sure it's slow (how could it be any way else), but it represents more than 400 million people trying to build a shared future. And it's the only example of something like that in human history. Look how good the relationship with between the US and Mexico works, the way the US structures its relationship (guns, border walls) is mostly responsible for an insane drug war. Look how China structures it's relationship with it's neighbors. I think it's highly likely that most neighboring countries will join the EU step by step, ant the EU will adapt change, become more effective, less effective. But it's hard to compare such a unique human experiment with anything.

emilsedgh 6y ago
Here is something irrelevant to the original post but relevant to your comment: I'd have a 50 year bet that Russia will join the EU. From a cultural perspective, many eastern European countries have Russian roots and will make the transition smoother. From a geopolitical perspective, neither have a choice. Both need to be able to compete with China and U.S. in terms of economy.
- d3ckard 6y ago
  Which countries have Russian roots? I'm not aware of any.
  - lou1306 6y ago
    Although not an EU country, Serbia would be the best example. However, I would say "Russian ties" rather than "Russian roots". For instance, they both are Slavic, Orthodox countries, and have been historically allied.

thu2111 6y ago

This analysis is abysmal, the sort of quality I'd expect from the Guardian, and I'm not even American. It'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. 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't happen it means they're really trying to rank Americans vs the Swiss vs the Chinese vs the Koreans, but presumably that would sound racist, so they don't admit that. Moreover this doesn't seem to pass a basic reality check: if someone comes up with a ranking function for countries in innovation and the USA isn't even in the top 10 then my first reaction is "your criteria are probably buggy, please double check that". We'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. “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. 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 "the better tech doesn't always win" is folk wisdom by now. Their re-definition doesn't stop there: “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.” Welding people in their houses and forcing them to undergo medical testing is not "innovation" 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 not 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. Korea’s return to the top spot is mainly due to an increase in patent activity, where it ranks top If patent activity were a good proxy for innovation then IBM would be the world's top tech firm. Anyone who has done R&D knows the patent system is awash with garbage patents. As the two biggest economies, the U.S. and China account for much of the world’s innovation Here they switch their definition of innovation again, and the article is by now internally inconsistent: US and China account for "much" of the world's innovation yet neither are in the top 10 most innovative countries. By the end of the article it's become openly politically biased: 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&D and breakthrough technologies, a policy he labeled Innovate in America. Innovation is now about how many foreign students you take in, the US being downranked is all Trump's fault, then innovation becomes about how much manufacturing you do and Biden is going to fix it with state control of the economy. 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.” Back to commercial success again. Anyone familiar with the history of the world's biggest tech firms will see a common recurring pattern: • 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. • They very frequently drop out of university to found their business. It'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.

EdwinLarkin 6y ago

Europe does well to keep talents in relative poverty compared to our peers in the US. Most IT people are in the 50-60k/pa bracket.Some are in 80k and anything > 100k/pa is an exception. And this is usually with progressive taxation starting with 30% and going upwards. Most of the good housing costs > 400k and we are talking small apartments because it's Europe and if you live in the suburbs you give up all the great infrastructure. Moving around in Europe is a nightmare especially if your spouse is in a field that requires intermediate/native level of the local language.

enriquto 6y ago
Are you joking? 50k is not "relative poverty" by any definition.
- dijit 6y ago
  This is such a complicated topic that it's hard to make generalisations that apply in all cases. The US is similar to Europe in that standards can be wildly different between states/countries. 50k EUR in Estonia is a lot different to 50k in Sweden. But I would say, on average, that the difference is that it's cheaper to have a good life in Europe. If you earn 50k in Sweden, it would roughly give me the same QoL as a person living on 150k in NYC (or 80k in London!), and if I earned 60k in Sweden then it would feel roughly the same as 200k in NYC, because the costs don't scale linearly. But the difference between me, an IT professional on a "good" wage (which, actually does feel like a good wage btw) and a Waitress at a restaurant is not so incredibly vast as to make sure that the waitress lives in perpetual poverty. The gap is smaller and because of it the wealth feels attainable and people are a bit more content. Contentedness is far better than the "dollar amount" of capital you have, wealth is feeling good about your life, some people conflate the fact that it costs a lot of money to feel content and secure in the USA with the rest of the world. I've lived in Finland, Sweden, Estonia and I was raised in the UK. Income equality has a long way to go in the UK, so what I say does not apply there at all.
  - distances 6y ago
    I see you're hopping the Nordic countries. How similar are they in reality? Is it fair to place all them in the same bucket as always is done in these discussions? What made you move from one to another?

RGamma 6y ago

Ugh another one of these "we take highly complex systems, a fuzzy property, some questionable proxies (number of patents lol) to measure it by and we compress it into a one-dimensional ranking" Oversimplification at best, make-believe at worst, especially since there are economists involved who in my book aren't exactly known for methodological rigor. You know, there might be some truth in this in say that that the top third is on average more innovative than the bottom third or something like that, but without in-depth justification you just can't know, so this is simply economist fantasy?

dragonelite 6y ago

Im a bit skeptical about rankings by western nations, given the last year. That most prepared for a pandemic ranking picture has pretty much become a meme right now.

known 6y ago

mRNA vaccines were rolled out by USA and Germany :)

orange_tee 6y ago

Maybe the disconnect here is that they are talking about "innovation" but not necessarily profitable innovation. There's also something to be said about the kind of innovation that disrupts a whole market, and the kind of innovation that incrementally improves on some process or tool. Maybe another question would be, is there enough of the latter kind of innovation to make up (economically) for the lack of unicorns?

mbrodersen 6y ago
Unicorns are a net negative to the world. Uber isn’t even a business for example. It is using invested money to make taxis cheaper. That’s not innovative or even a business.