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Comment by martinshen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

Does the EU? Do they produce EU-wide crime reports? EU-wide economic reports?

If not, don't blame the media...

Yes, on all common metrics, in great detail: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat

True, the EU is a confederation. Also true: it's not a country.

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.

The US didn't think of itself as a country until after the civil war. Even once the Federal government took power, individuals aligned more with their state than their State.

As to the EU having a military? They're getting there with the US finally starting to get tired of defending the region with little respect. https://www.wikitribune.com/story/2017/11/15/european_union/...

The countries in the EU go to war independently, the states of the US do so as one. I think that's where the line goes, really.

> 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.

Is this like a gut feeling or something? Like, totally based on like, the HN bubble, like totally.

By the same ranking, China is way below the US. It has a lot of educated people, we can argue that it has innovation in its first tier cities, but it also has A LOT of uneducated farmers.

Yeah, innovation levels differ much more within countries than between them. Rankings of metro areas would make more sense.

Your 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.

> McGill the Harvard of Canada

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.

It would perhaps be more interesting to look at cities, or for the us at least states.

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