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Comment by invalidname | Hacker News Reader

I think a far more interesting bit of information is that Israel has 9M people yet ranks second behind India with 1.4Bn people. Ahead of far larger countries...

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You cannot compare since the data is confounded.

It’s way easier for Israelis to migrate to the us, than it is for Indians.

That is true. But again, look down the list. Other countries (also much bigger) with far easier path to the states are even lower on the list.

countries with fewer barriers to immigrations have fewer reasons to immigrate in the first place

44% of Israel's exports is ICT, it's not surprising to see them create more than expected tech unicorns.

You should expect such a small country outlier given how this sort of thing is distributed.

India's unicorns are concentrated in a few cities, which house a relatively small portion of India's population.

If that were true Taiwan would be higher in the ranking.

I suspect if you adjusted for market cap, Taiwan would be higher ;)

Imagine randomly picking a hundred points on the globe. By coincidence, you pick one location in a small country. Now you look at the density of points by population, and that small country has an unusually high density.

Grouping data by country tends to get you these small country outliers for almost any statistic.

That data isn't random, it's based on countries, cultures, demographics etc. You see the correlation beyond number of unicorns. You see it in academic awards and achievements too. Claiming that data is just random seems lazy.

If Israel is doing things right, it's worth studying why and emulating it elsewhere.

I, of course, did not make any claim that the world is somehow random. That was what is known as an analogy.

Not every small country to be an 'outlier'.

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