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Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

I think that perhaps the world is a much bigger place than you believe (and maybe this is endemic to the general nationalistic line of thinking that I'm objecting against).

The US has 4.4% of the world's population. How you expect that even with the 'social and genetic engineering' you describe the US could still have the majority, I don't know.

I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of innovative people in the US - just that there are greatly innovative people all over the world, and perhaps it's time people start to acknowledge that...

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No one is saying that innovation doesn't happen in other places in the world, or that the people there aren't brilliant. Only that by evidence of the size and output of the economy in the US, it is the most effective. That may not be true forever, and there have been a great number of words dedicated to making that argument, but it appears to be true today.

What worries me most about the thinking in the US right now is the xenophobia. If there is one thing I'm most proud of, as a citizen of the USA, it's that people want to come here. I want to welcome them with open arms. I want to work hard to make the US the "place to be" for starting a business.

No one is suggesting that. What is suggested is that it doesn't really matter how innovative you are if you are a child soldier in Zimbabwe, in a place where the taxes are so high that very few can start a new business, or in a country that is so corrupt that only an official's cousins brother could get the necessary permits to do business. Therefore business leaders in the US are more innovative because there are fewer non-merit based restrictions.

The fact is the most successful people in the US were not born here. But ask yourself why didn't Brin, or Grove start companies back home? Mostly because those countries didn't provide the right environment to do so, and America does.

Yes but the western world itself is less than a third of the world's population and no one would argue against it having the majority of so-called "dynamic" people. Without knowing how many people we're talking about (and neither of us do) you can't argue percentage of the population as a reason.

The one point I'd agree with though is this: there are probably tons of third world people who are just as entrepreneurial as people in the U.S. but who don't have the resources to do anything more than start a coke stand. But in terms of dynamic people who have the resources to start a company I still think the U.S. is in the lead

There might be a little confusion with semantics here. I don't believe any of us can argue that the US has't led MOST of the world in innovations that are adopted on a large scale.

There is a difference between being innovative and actually having the resources to profit from that innovation. I've seen ingenious solutions to problems in my travels, but due to the lack of marketing/funding/distribution/etc., these inventions/solutions are only adopted by the town the inventor lives in.

ed, sp.error.

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