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Comment by youngerdryas | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this explains a strange situation. Europe is bigger than the US, is well educated, free and prosperous. You would think that more technological innovation would come from Europe, or at least it would be on par, but that is far from the case. There have been several articles on this lately but none seem to have an answer.

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US has a 10x factor of industrial efficiency due it's size as as unified nation.

Your cell phone was basically invented in Finland. So was Linux. The English cracked Enigma.

Genuinely curious, how do you measure innovation?

I had a quick google for some data and the best measure I could find was this[1], which places the US on a similar level to the European/Scandinavian countries with strong economies.

[1] http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii/main/fullreport/fil...

I really wish there was actual competition to the US but there is not. I can make an argument and cite findings that show that China is more free than Europe but it is still patently false. What is the EU equivalent of NASA, Apple, Google, SpaceX etc. Competition is good for all, pretending is not.

So it's just your gut feeling that the US is more innovative than the EU? Edit: That comes across as more snarky than it's meant.

In the same way it is my gut feeling the EU is more free than China.

Well sure, but you could back that up with data[1]. With the innovation index the data apparently disputes your gut feeling. So which do you trust?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

I gave you my list of US innovators, lets see your list.

I don't have a list, and I'm not seeing this as a competition. If you want to see where the GII data comes from I'm sure it's on their website.

No, you gave a list consisting of: one huge government agency (there's ESA, and pretty much every EU nation has some king of space exploration agency), one giant hardware corporation which made tons of money doing incremental improvement on others' inventions, a giant software company milking a single innovation to build an effective monopoly, and a private space research company.

It's a vast difference between "technology innovator" and "a successful international corporation built on technology innovations", and Europe has a ton of the former. For every Tesla there's a Rimac Automobili, for every SpaceX there's a Hipersfera -- and that's just from a small country on the edge of EU. I'm sure others could come up with better results from elsewhere.

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