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

What drags the US down most in these rankings is &quot;tertiary efficiency&quot;: roughly the fraction of people in grad school or with graduate degrees.<p>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.<p>If you&#x27;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.

Honestly a lot of these &quot;global&quot; rating systems are ridiculous. The US easily produces the most innovation globally.<p>This is similar to ranking systems that consider McGill the Harvard of Canada or consider Babson College the #1 for Entrepreneurship.

The discussion so far reminds me a little of whenever a &quot;Top N school rankings&quot; 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?

Is the metric for most stem masters or phds useful? The Soviet Union use to produce many such people but never achieved much.

Many 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.<p>I wish these articles had a &quot;Ways in which our claim could be wrong&quot; section. Maybe every article should. E.g. Here is what i think, but here are aspects of it that I haven&#x27;t looked into that could make me change my stance.<p>At the very least, you&#x27;d know the author made some effort to be truthful, and not just sensationalist&#x2F;misled.<p>Perhaps we can have a browser extension that aggregates and ranks crowdsourced feedback on articles such as this one? :P

&gt; 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.<p>OK this is hilariously misguided as a metric. Also, I have some familiarity with the SK tech industry. They&#x27;re catching up to US standards and hold themselves back by prioritizing the old-school mechanisms for upward movement which hinge on seniority&#x2F;age and pedigree.

Every time I see a ranking like this, I think: <i>wow, what a crap ranking.</i><p>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.<p>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&#x27;s a city-state. China fares very poorly because it has three-quarters of a billion people who aren&#x27;t doing anything particularly from an innovation perspective. America has the same &quot;problem&quot; on a smaller scale. But innovative places like Shenzhen or the SF Bay Area can approach Singaporean levels of innovation, while China and America&#x27;s innovation output as a whole certainly outdo Singapore&#x27;s.<p>So this ranking is showing neither the total innovation output of a country, nor the &quot;innovation density&quot; of places where innovators actually congregate. So what <i>is</i> it showing? Basically nothing.<p>(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.)

Part of the problem, money is flowing more towards sinks like &quot;Social Influencers&quot;, &quot;V-loggers&quot; and other similar jobs. Younger generation is focusing more on instant fame&#x2F;money&#x2F;reward&#x2F;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&#x2F;her pictures than someone holding a Phd. Forget about academia jobs there are no more jobs in post-docs positions in USA anymore.

Is # of patent applications really a criteria in innovation? Seems to value quantity over quality.

An &quot;innovation&quot; ranking that doesn&#x27;t have the U.S. in the top 10 is like a ranking of U.S. universities that doesn&#x27;t have Harvard or Stanford in the top 10. It says more about the ranking methodology than what is being ranked.

Just 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&#x2F;education&#x2F;economy&#x2F;$thing seems worthwhile?<p>Still, is it just me, or are the most posts here reflex-like defenses of the US?<p>What would you suggest instead? It would have to yield actionable results, mind you...

<i>“One common trait of the U.S., Korea and China is that people accept failure as part of the process,”</i><p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s true about Korea, and it is the core reason for the lack of vibrant startups in Korea.

I don&#x27;t fully understand why with the best universities and the best startups, the U.S. is not number one. Of course, it&#x27;s a big country with not only tech companies in the economy, that seems counterintuitive to include this in the calculation though.

I&#x27;m quite sure this goes in hand with the poor education that the U.S provides.

When 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 &quot;Innovation Index&quot; that doesn&#x27;t place the US at or very close to the top is not a useful proxy for impactful innovation.

I mean, sure, it&#x27;s feasible that Israel unseated the US at no. 10, but also the US gives Israel tens of billions of dollars in support.

Reminds me of this interview of Mariana Mazzucato on &quot;The green innovation race&quot; which I revisited in light of the new tariffs on solar panels: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hygM6nJFXa0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hygM6nJFXa0</a><p>Bad ideology is dragging us down.