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Comment by exar0815 | Hacker News Reader

If I were very cynical, i would see the reason for the great stagnation in the fact that the USA wasn't able to either rob any country blind or profit from some widespread unrest in the last decades. A lot of the technical leadership the US has maintained in the 20th century was built on the shoulders of others. Be it the german pharmaceutical industry after world war 1, jewish immigrants from europe, operation paperclip, east european intellectuals during the cold war, asian immigrants fleeing wars, the US has always attracted or coerced these people. And I think atleast voluntary immigration to the US is declining due to the political and social issues with which the US is associated more and more. At least in my wider social circle (Engineering/Sciences), very few people are even considering the US to emigrate to anymore, which is a major contrast to 10-15 years ago.

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The fact that you aren't considering asian or jewish immigrants to be American is somewhat telling of your view of America in general. Immigrating to the US for better economic opportunities isn't the US building "on the shoulders of others" as you put it. Those immigrants are Americans, and they are almost exclusively why America sustained technical dominance post WW2.

They are Americans now, but they weren't when they decided to come to the US, and were it not for some disaster they likely would have stayed or left in much lower numbers.

The fact that America does not suffer from the kind of disruptions that cause other countries to lose their talent may be the reason for its winning advantage. Why not look for what that is instead of blaming a country for giving refuge to those that need it and benefiting from the natural rewards that come.

I didn't see the parent doing that. The parent was theorizing that the reason why US/Western tech is in some kind of stagnation is because the world is more stable and so the stability advantage is reduced.

Also, it is an undeniable fact that the US and the Western world in general were in no small part the causes, or certainly exacerbating factors, of these disruptions.

Agreed on the latter point, and the burgeoning global software industry will likely break stagnation even further, but all the examples of breaking stagnation in the article are American companies.

Anyways I don't want to come off as some flag-waving nationalist, I just dont think that the story of immigrant success in the United States should be painted as America exploiting these people's talents at their expense.

Sure, if everyone was content no one would look for opportunities. I don't see the point.

The point is that the gradient of discontent is no longer as harsh in the western direction, and that the OP theorizes that this is a reason for the decreasing share of the productivity growth focused in the West/US.

There is some empirical evidence for those theories. The US and the West in general have profited of disruptions they caused or partially helped, from scuttling research projects using political pressure and then hiring the researchers into the US up to arming rebellions and indeed military intervention.

while those immigrants did great things. the economy was certainly not exclusively built on them. in fact it’s the opposite. they came to america because it was growing with a lot of opportunity and wealth. you’re reversing the causality

When you read biographies from the early 20th century like Edison's (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/820) you get a sense of how quickly innovation moved. And, how far ahead the USA was, of everyone else.

Also when you read these biographies you realize that science education has never really been appreciated in the USA or England. These countries do occasionally spit out great innovators, but not because of the educational system. It's because people in the USA are free to peruse what they want, and the USA has lots of capital.

> When you read [ American ] biographies from the early 20th century like Edison's ... you get a sense of how quickly innovation moved. And, how far ahead the USA was, of everyone else.

Don't forget these are self-serving documents. This is not a slur on Americans: I once gave a talk at La Vilette in Paris. An English colleague of mine came along. As we walked in he sneered, "this is the kind of place where the French claim to have invented everything." Of course in the UK you can find such places as well. You can find the same elsewhere.

Edison did good work on the light bulb ... building on a Canadian patent. The automobile was not invented in the USA. The A bomb was invented in the USA by ... an international team. Especially in the early 20s the USA was not "far ahead of everyone else".

Where the US does endanger itself is a certain myopia. For example space museums in the US typically only discuss the US space program, as if, apart from a quick mention of Sputnik and perhaps Gargarin, it was the only one. It's understandable that many people will be more interested in the developments of their country! But that view, writ large, means people will suffer crappy things too (e.g. lousy medical system) not realizing that things really are better elsewhere. It also means, when, say, jobs move to China, that that country must be an "enemy". In reality it's not a wealthy country and has a lot of tough problems. And has advanced technology the US does not.

The idea that immigration is declining due to social and political issues lacks perspective.

Despite all the rhetoric, the US is high among the most equitable, least racist, safest and politically free countries in the world.

If immigration regulation were relaxed, there would be a flood of well-educated people from China, India and many other nations.

On the other hand, immigrants from western Europe don't have much to gain from moving the the US. They basically would be trading higher salaries for higher expenses.

I can tell you as a matter of fact that many immigrants, even outside of Western Europe, no longer see as much of an incentive to emigrate, and when they do the US is no longer the undisputed #1 place to go. I would imagine this is certainly even more the case in China and India, where development is even faster, and you can even notice immigrants leaving the US.

This isn't really a concern when at the same time the people wishing to immigrate vastly outnumber the people accepted for immigration, as evidenced by the yearly limit for most visas being reached within days.

The vast majority of people that want to immigrate to the US are not going to contribute to innovation, and those that do are accepted.

Why did you move the goalpost towards "innovation"? If you're on an H1B visa, you're probably contributing to some company attempting to be innovative. If not, who cares? The economy doesn't run on innovation alone.

The thesis of the article is that the US economy's "Great Stagnation" in productivity is due to a lack of innovation. There are no goalposts being moved.

Contributing to a company attempting to be innovative doesn't mean that you are being innovative, and so the degree at which you are capable of innovation doesn't matter very much. As for people being recruited specifically for innovation, there is essentially no limit in their immigration.

The American self hate / leftist meme ("America is only great because it robs other people") is fascinating. There are very good arguments against it.

I wouldn't assume the opposite and become a boastful patriot either, but maybe the big leaps taken in the past were so good that people got lazy. You didn't need to innovate or only innovate for money (which isn't nearly as effective a motivator as being annihilated by Germans or ICBMs). There is also the argument of low hanging fruits, but I find that it's easy to undervalue the inventions of things you already know very well.

There is no grand narrative anymore. Things are just chugging along. Covid is a new narrative and voilá: mRNA vaccine.

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