Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

Another thing usually missing in comparisons with European countries is that all of Europe benefits from America inventing/pioneering so much stuff that they can adopt.

View on HN

Two questions:

1. What has this to do with education? 2. Doesn't America benefits from European / (or Asian, etc) innovations?

1. Nothing much (you could bring up eLearning and multimedia learning aids, I guess), it was tangentially related to the meta-topic of articles which compare European successes and American failures (usually in the domain of 'social programs')

2. Yes, but America innovates far more. A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention. Put bluntly, we all get a free ride off America's investment in R&D. Just something to keep in mind when you think about 'changing the system' or even just measuring it.

A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention

At least before February 11th that wasn't true. While the first-ever cell phone may have been built in the US, Nokia has contributed quite a bit to how modern phones work. You may remember Apple for instance paying patent royalties on 3G tech to them.

USA puts more money to R&D than anybody else, but it isn't like the rest of the world is just stealing innovation.

Which American invention did Nokia "get a free ride off"? The telephone? (invented by a Scot) Radio? (an Italian) The battery? (also Italian)

Or do you mean the next generation stuff, like the computer, specifically ARM chips these days? (both British ideas), touchscreens (also British), GSM (pan-European project pioneered in Finland).

Or is it the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of patents Apple licensed from Nokia last year?

To put it bluntly, American exceptionalists would have a lot less room for triumphalism if they hadn't got a free ride off European investment in R&D. Or we could decide that claiming part of the process of invention on behalf of a nation and claiming everyone else was just copying is a bit silly?

A cursory glance at Google search results gives an idea of how much American contributes to science (which is just the starting point, you've then got the whole process of industrialisation and market-making): http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/news/2007-06/8392239/ http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php

EDIT: for people who didn't click the links, it shows America has more scientific papers among the top 1% of most-cited papers... than all the other countries put together

Bell invented the telephone, but where did he go to get funding and start a company/industry? Where did Marconi and Daniell go ? To Britain, which occupied about the same spot as US as industrial/scientific leader once upon a time.

The point is that a country like Norway say could do nothing but sit on their oil income - and every year life would still get better as they buy new technology from America. But for America, of whoever the world leader is, this is not an option. It's got nothing to do with copying or taking credit or whatever - it's just recognising that the flow of benefit from innovation is not symmetrical.

If you'd take the population differences into account, the numbers would be a bit different. Given that Sweden has only 10 million habitants, it seems to push around twice the amount of US scientific output/capita. (Norway and Finland achieve similar efficiency with 5m people) Yeah, what US is doing is pretty impressive, but it's not like Europeans have been much of freeriding either.

And then there was the whole World War thing, snatching top scientists for cold war etc... The polarization of world during the recent history is a bit more complicated issue than the US just kicking ass in everything. And the future is kind of interesting too. (youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)

The per capita figures make the other countries look better (although ultimately that doesn't change the underlying point), although the fact that USA has more of the top 1% of papers than all the other countries put together tells a different story. And the other countries do get to free-ride on this... I mean you could set up a communist state with a religious dictatorship, and still it would get the benefit of what the American economy comes up with. You have to question how much of someone's quality of life is down to the chosen system of government, and how much is down to technology (and possibly other things like foreign investors and foreign buyers) they have access to.

What is the point of your pro-US trolling? You've already admitted that the falsehoods you've stated have nothing to do with the thread anyway.

>The per capita figures make the other countries look better

lol, classic.

A cursory glance at Google search results in... ENGLISH... ?

for people who didn't click the links, it shows... either A) ENGLISH speaking countries dominate the most-cited papers (tah dahhh). B) American papers cite American papers (parochialism versus merit).

Tycho: bias, correlations, and network effects...

I think you're clutching at straws. 90% of scientific papers are published in English anyway, plus the study never said it excluded non-English papers. And the figures show that America dominates the most cited papers - it shows England, Canada and Australia doing fairly well but not really better than non-English-speaking countries. Sure you could remove some bias if you really tried... But we could also look at other metrics such as, say, what investors put their money in: like how the iShares ETF based on the S&P Global Technology Index concentrates a massive 77% of its holdings on US companies http://us.ishares.com/product_info/fund/overview/IXN.htm . Or basically just pay attention to the breakthroughs that get reported by the press: top ten discoveries of the decade, http://news.discovery.com/human/discoveries-of-the-decade.ht..., almost all American researchers; best inventions of the decade, http://www.inventhelp.com/Newsletter/2009_12/time-magazine-b... , mostly american companies; or look at pharmaceutical companies by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pharmaceutical_compani... ; I mean I'm just picking the first such articles that pop up. You'll probably say that these are biased to Americans... but really, if you just pay attention to what gets reported in something like New Scientist (British publication) you'll see how much America contributes.

Plus, the counter points that people cite tend to be lone inventors who either left their home nation to set up shop in the US (or UK when it was the leader), or whose inventions/discoveries were not capitalised upon. Whereas America is full of not just great research, but the rise of entire industries that other nations can then participate in.

Is this the part where people are supposed to start chanting "USA! USA! USA!"?

What part of calculus came out of US R&D? Or do they skip that and go directly to cell phone engineering in high school now?

America benefits from the innovations of other nations, but Americans are worried. Looking at history, America's rise to prominence in the 20th century seems to have been largely fueled by being the innovator, the inventor. The worry thus being, what will happen to them when they aren't anymore?

Yeah. It's super ironic to read all the "these socialist solutions of small nations can't scale for big US". And then from the other side "this silly anarchistic free-trade capitalistic solution can't scale for mighty China."

I thought Europeans had the "not-invented-here" syndrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com