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.
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".
So its an equally weighted average of 7 categories. The data was reported by the nations themselves.
Now the key takeaway is that the US dropped out of the top 10. Comparatively, you can tell something is changing in the US causing a drop.
Metrics are just indicator, and can sometimes misrepresent the reality, but more often, there's truth in the metrics also. Its hard to say what the impact of this innovation score is, is it economic, or is it social, but clearly the score change is due to real realities changing.
The reported numbers from other countries, or the reported numbers from the US, could also be flawed. Just because numbers have changed relative to one another, doesn't mean that countries have done so as well. You are assuming a particular causal relationship when there are several plausible alternative theories available.
> more often, there's truth in the metrics
Metric isn't the right word. It would make sense for tangible qualities like area, population, and even GNP. But the measured quality here is "innovation," with an amalgam of other characteristics taken as the one true proxy thereof. It's a ranking, but it's not actually measuring innovation.
> clearly the score change is due to real realities changing.
It could also be a change in reported numbers. Or even random noise that tends to revert. These numbers may not even be relevant to the true seeds of innovation.
It's the change in relative rankings that is the useful data from these rankings, rather than the absolute ranking.
> Comparatively, you can tell something is changing in the US causing a drop.
Yes, one of the factors they used to come up with this rating. Now - the question is, are those factors actually correlated with innovation?
Now, maybe the US isn't as innovative as Sweden is. Ok. What exactly does that mean? Why do I care if the percentage of graduate educated people is higher? How does that actually affect innovation? Are those people releasing new, globally-changing products and services? What are some examples?
What does it mean if Samsung has more US patents than any other company besides IBM? Is IBM more innovative than Google?
It's fun and popular to bash the U.S. (has been for some time) but I really don't see much meaning behind these rankings. It's not an in-depth study. Amazon has more criteria for picking a HQ. Do you really think Bloomberg can look at these '7 criteria' and come up with a meaningful estimation? No.
Even the notion "hard science" vs "soft science" is a very slippery slope, IMO. We should not seek to speak of "hard" vs "soft" science; instead, we should focus on distinguishing good from bad science. Even science performed on incredibly difficult and complex topics (with immensely numerous confounding variables, near impossibility of controlled trials/experiments, etc.) can still be done correctly! One simply needs to adhere to statistical rigor and qualify conclusions from data with appropriate levels of uncertainty, withhold conclusions with no predictive power or statistical significance, and publish meaningful negative results just as frequently as positive results.
This movement of lax scientific rigor within fields that call themselves "sciences" is incredibly dangerous and threatens to erode the credibility of all results/fields that call themselves "scientific" in the eyes of the general public -- the vast majority of whom do not have the time, energy, or ability to review each field and/or publication to understand how rigorous and honest it actually is.
When you read about problems of anti-intellectualism and public distrust in science, the first thing we should do is look to the "sciences" (and bad journalism) that justify this distrust.
"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." while honest and true doesn't get the masses clicking. Honest and true doesn't get stories bumped to the frontpage of HN.
I do feel for these journalists. They are like daily vloggers who have to deal with the constant pressure of generating content every single day to make money. That's like clickbait is so rampant in both the traditional and social media.
1) Formally define what is meant by "innovation" in terms of clearly measurable outcomes.
2) Measure this clearly-defined quality among all countries and many sample points through time.
3) Try to separate out explanatory variables for the quality being measured. Build these data driven statistical models to model this formally defined "innovation" quantity -- not using hand-tuned weights of various measures, as these "rankings" or "indexes" often do.
4) Try to predict a probability distribution of the "innovation" quality, using models developed in step 3.
Step 1 should be qualified with explanation that this human-designed definition is an imperfect, and that all results should be understood in the context of this formal definition.
Step 2 should be qualified with notes of any possible limitations in the sampling methodology (availability of data, etc.) and how this factors into error margins.
Step 3 should be qualified with sufficient explanation that it's a model of reality derived from data, and therefore risks overfitting/underfitting/etc. errors.
Step 4 should be qualified with an explanation that this is a prediction based on the above model fit, and therefore is subject to potential errors compounded by any of the previous steps.
That would be the scientifically/statistically responsible and rigorous thing to do. But I suppose I'm crazy to expect Bloomberg to aim for any level of rigor in these "indexes".
Surely you can see that this is not possible, and any attempted would be superficial and would be gamed anyway?
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.
Of course all that means is that it isn't a perfect proxy. It may well still be a good proxy. Tough to call.
1. Gross tertiary enrollment ratio
2. Percentage of working-age population with advanced level of education
3. Annual new science and engineering graduates as a percentage total tertiary graduates
4. Annual new science and engineering graduates as a percentage of the labor force
huh?
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.
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.
This is similar to ranking systems that consider McGill the Harvard of Canada or consider Babson College the #1 for Entrepreneurship.
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.
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.
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 country.
You seem to have an axe to grind. No published ranking I know of ever uses that phrase. The phrase really only appears in newspaper articles, and only because American reporters want to pep up their piece about universities in Canada, which the average American knows close to nothing about.
McGill is a good school. It's silly to be a "Harvard" of anything.
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.
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_...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation...
edit: formatting
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.
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”.
American measures of creativity are narrow minded, short sighted, taken from singular point of view.
The first two domestic microwave ovens in the Ussr were: first one, built without a magnetron, with "surplus" solid state RF emitters because all magnetrons were spent on military radars; second one, made with multi-kilowatt, water cooled klystron and weighted 60 kg, because the designer thought "with klystron, we can modulate the power with a cheap rheostat" without having to use "complex, tricky, always breaking mechanical timers."
"USA does not have talent to build kitchen appliances out of super duper expensive mil-spec components?" - will ask some. No, but US simply never had conditions that would've required creative solutions to problems like "how to make consumer goods when the whole country has been turned into a munitions factory?"
What I can jab commenters above with is that behind each "particularly creative" article an American big co. releases, there are thousands of anonymous engineers, designers, software developers and many other highly skilled people working in outsourcing sweatshops in Asia.
For each "creativish" GUI app, there are thousands of research hours of anonymous geniuses that went into fundamental research in computer science and electronics engineering that made it possible that you can carry computing power of a supercomputer from few generations ago in your pocket.
Now, how many artsy, creativish, anorexic tech CEOs there are in US who are, say, epitaxy metrology specialists who know how to grow 3D transistors with 10 times fewer mask scans than a competitor?
Yes, the Soviet Union had many problems, but
>how did they apply these technologies to create products the market actually want
is essentially just asking "why were they communist and not capitalist?"
Saying that “they never achieved much” is a gigantic understatement!!
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?
It's a disgusting state of affairs, regardless of anyone's opinion on Russia.
[0] https://www.rt.com/business/415345-united-states-buying-russ...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/how-the-u...
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.
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.
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.
They did not cared, in the first place through. They were not capitalist. They actual failure is that they did not achieved world domination and that they did not managed to build that new superior human they wanted. Those were the ideological goals.
They also did monernized Russia after they came to power, monarchy they replaced was very behind the technology of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180#Replacement_for_the_RD-...
At the time though, they did a heck of a lot of good basic research -- plus the whole "first man on space" thing.
Here’s your source: 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.
That
The very same thing is with China these days I say from my first hand experience.
Here is one example from great many:
I once worked with Rapoo, a PC peripherals and cellphone accessories manufacturer. They had a guy who was a brilliant industrial designer. He authored ALL of Rapoo's Red Dot award winning products (and they have many.) The only problem with him was (or how it looked to company's managers) that he had no degree, and he was a vocational school grad. He first came to the company as an unpaid intern, and he then designed their first award winning product while still receiving no salary. That product was his first design work at the company. He singlehandedly made them known and distinguished from the sea of noname OEMs all making products that looks like half-used soap bars.
It took his extreme efforts just to get his design being chosen over a yet another boring one bought from product design sweatshop.
When it became news that it was his design that won the company fame, the reaction from managers was not encouragement, but disdain! It was only enough to get him hired full time on a measly salary. He continued to work and win awards for them.
After years without any recognition, he thought it was enough when it came to yet another design review where he had to defend his vision in front of bimboish mid-managers. Contending with his design was one from a recently hired mediocre Italian designer (hired for an astonishing salary of 50k CNY per month, while his was just 12k.) After hours of intense debates with the "jury," they were both told to "just to do it like that Apple style" for the reason "Apple style is expensive." That was the last drop for him.
The guy now lives a comfy life and enjoys a dream job in one idyllic Alpine country.
What I wanted to say here: just like Soviets killed their own computer industry out of their own sense of insecurity and fiery inferiority complex, Chinese industry alienates its best genuine talents by not being able to admit over insecurities of the affluent class that Chinese tech specialists can produce superior original works themselves.
If only even 1% of Chinese corporate functionaries had little bit more of believe in themselves, along with self-esteem and self-confidence. If they thought in a way where they don't think "there is no chance that we can do this better than foreigners" before even trying, Chinese industry would've been like nothing it is today.
Your "source" looks like a troll to me
Both my parents were on their 2nd PhD in Russia in during that time (born 1942) both are Jewish the level of plagiarism in the academia was insane they had to enroll under non Jewish names to be even accepted were accused of plagiarism multiple times while some of their dissertations were not only plagiarized but effectively stolen.
It took my father probably an extra decade to get trough every thing PhD in biology and an MD simply because of the corruption in the academia where party favorites got preferential treatments and outcasts would have their exams lost recieve false penalties and if you happen to be Jewish often given tests which were designed to be impossible to pass.
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
But now with the internet, any rando can read this stuff and obsess over it.
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.
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.)
And vast hordes, often indistinguishable but for luck, making far less. But they are less visible, inherently.
It's all just advertising. Print advertising is dead (hyperbole), replaced by social advertising.
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.
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...
I don't think that's true about Korea, and it is the core reason for the lack of vibrant startups in Korea.
Is this really $3B/y of military aid for buying weapons from US?
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.
That isn't what your source says... where'd you get that number?
[0]: https://www.foreignassistance.gov/explore/country/Israel
Bad ideology is dragging us down.
