[bluecmd]

Since you mention regulation, I think it is something to be proud of. GDPR, Germany saying hell-no to forced Facebook accounts, etc.

As for innovation? US isn't even top 10 when it comes to Nobel prize per capita (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_l...).

IKEA, SAP, Beretta, Airbus, Spotify, Linux, Prometheus, Grafana, Booking.com just from the top of my head of things that are proof of European innovation and tech sector.

[adventured]

> As for innovation? US isn't even top 10 when it comes to Nobel prize per capita

Your per capita list is an epic compliment to the US.

The fact that the US is #15 per capita is extraordinary, given your list is comparing the US to top ten countries like East Timor, Saint Lucia, Luxembourg and Iceland, where if you get one or two you leap ahead of the entire world.

Among large population nations, only the UK and Germany rank higher, with Germany only slightly ahead. The UK for their part are far beyond everyone else on any reasonable comparison scale.

The US has five times the population of France and exceeds them on Nobels per capita. That is an amazing performance by the US.

The fact that the US is so massive and still ranks ahead of: the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Finland, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc. - is similarly staggering.

The US has over three times the rate of Italy, nearly double the rate of Canada, and over five times the rate of Japan.

The US per capita rate is 46% higher than the EU.

I'm going to drop Saint Lucia, East Timor, Iceland and Luxembourg from the comparison list because it's beyond silly, they all have one Nobel and micro populations. On a more rational list, the US is #11, with an 11.7 rate per 10m people. A nearby comparison is Ireland with a 14.5 rate; Ireland has seven total, the US has 383 and roughly 70 times the population. Like I said, it's an epic compliment for the US to be so highly ranked on a list dominated by small populations. The US is the sole country over 100 million population until you get down to #35 Japan at a 2.2 rate; except for the UK, the top 10 is all under 10 million population.

[romanoderoma]

> extraordinary, given your list is comparing the US to top ten countries like East Timor, Saint Lucia, Luxembourg and Iceland

Compare that with the resources available and it will look much less extraordinary

It is extraordinary that countries with much less resources, much less competition and orders of magnitude smaller pool of talents to chose from (4 orders of magnitude in the case of Iceland, East Timor and Luxembourg), can rival the richest and most powerful country in the World in modern history

But let's look at the US noble prize winners

     19 born in Germany
     12 born in Canada
     11 born in United Kingdom
      7 born in Italy
      7 born in Russia
      6 born in China
      6 born in Austria
      4 born in India
      4 born in Hungary
      3 born in South Africa
      3 born in France
      2 born in Poland
      2 born in Netherlands
      2 born in Romania
      2 born in Japan
      2 born in Israel
      1 born in Venezuela
      1 born in Turkey
      1 born in Taiwan
      1 born in Switzerland
      1 born in Spain
      1 born in Norway
      1 born in New Zealand
      1 born in Mexico
      1 born in Korea
      1 born in Ireland
      1 born in Egypt
      1 born in Australia

for a grand total of 103 Nobel prizes won by foreigners

[readarticle]

for a grand total of 103 Nobel prizes won by US citizens*

Meaning not only does the US outperform in Nobel laureates as a massive nation at a per capita level, it’s simultaneously attracting even more.

[romanoderoma]

You have to understand two things

- as Mark Kastner said "these prizes are a lagging indicator. They show us what we were doing right decades ago"

- Much of the research that lead Joachim Frank, a German born chemist, to win the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2017 took place in Europe and it was based on base research that took place outside of the US. The trio who was appointed was formed by Jacques Dubochet from Switzerland, Richard Henderson from Scotland and Frank from Germany. Frank was affiliated with US institutions when he was nominated, hence the prize has been claimed by US. They are basically buying Nobel prize winners post facto.

[WanderPanda]

> Unicorns are concentrated in a few countries/regions: United States (136), China (120), India (26), UK (15), South Korea (11), Israel (7), Indonesia (6), Singapore (4), Switzerland (4), Hong Kong (4), France (3), Portugal (3), Sweden (3), Australia (2), Belgium (2), Canada (2), Germany (2), Luxembourg (2), Spain (2), Ukraine (2) and ten other countries (1 each)

Israel has more than 3x more unicorns than we in Germany that tells one thing or two...

[yorwba]

Using unicorns as a proxy for innovation is maybe not a great idea, because it's just looking at a few outliers of heavily concentrated capital. It doesn't tell you anything about the majority of companies that are not unicorns and will never be, but that might nonetheless be highly innovative and profitable.

For example, if you look at foreign direct investment, the Netherlands lead the pack in 2017 with $4.888 trillion invested by residents of other countries. [1] Yet apparently there's only one Dutch unicorn (team.blue). Evidently there's a lot of investment going to other companies instead of betting on a single unicorn.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[romanoderoma]

It tells us that Israel have the same industrial military complex that US have

Put it in another way: their success is due military application of technology

Besides: what does counting unicorns proves?

Is Israel GDP per capita higher than Germany?

Is Israel richer than Germany?

Europe values other metrics more than simply pure market valuation

For example WhatsApp only employed 50 engineers when already had 900 million users

In Germany, and Europe in general, we prefer businesses that increase the general population employment than pure profit margins

EDIT:

a few resources about military industrial complex in Israel

https://medium.com/@davidsperorn/a-match-made-in-hell-israel...

https://www.tni.org/es/node/13511

https://www.jstor.org/stable/174246

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0140239830843716...

[dmitriid]

Among unicorns are:

- Uber, whose only innovation is price dumping using infinite investor cache on losing billions of dollars yearly

- Facebook, whose only innovation is creating festering echo chambers, siphoning private data wholesale and dodging laws

- JUUL, whose only innovation is selling electronic cigarettes

- Coinbase, whose only innovation is to be a middleman in bitcoin scams

- Magic Leap, whose only innovation is siphoning off investors' money and finally producing a subpar gadget

- Pinterest whose only innovation is spam Google search results with stolen pictures

etc.

There are very few actual innovators among these "unicorns".

[ThrowawayR2]

> "As for innovation? US isn't even top 10 when it comes to Nobel prize per capita (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_l...)."

Interestingly, those tables show the EU, as a whole, being several places behind the US per capita, both overall and in terms of science Nobels specifically. Kind of negates your point.

[Aunche]

Per capita statistics are heavily biased towards smaller countries. There are not enough Nobel prize a in history for any large country to have as many Nobel prize as the Faroe islands does.

[barry-cotter]

Booking is a subsidiary of Priceline, a US company. Nobel prize winners may not come from the US but in the sciences at least they live there.

[dna_polymerase]

GDPR is the perfect example for OPs point. The whole thing is just stupid, protects nobody and thought millions of people to just click on Okay on any modal they are presented with.

[irrational]

Sort of like the “this product will cause cancer in California” warnings on just about everything to the point that they become meaningless?

[nicbou]

There is a lot more to GDPR than cookie warnings. It ensures among other things that random companies won't get access to your data because of a purchase you made or a toll bridge you've crossed.

I go to the US every 2 or 3 years for a few days, and that's enough to end up on a bunch of American marketing lists. GDPR is here to prevent things like that.

It also prevents companies from holding my data hostage, and gives me a way to delete it.

There are other privacy-related laws that prevent companies from publishing a mugshot of me and extorting money from me to remove it.

There's more, but I think you get the point.

[AsyncAwait]

Far from perfect, but if your solution is for companies to self-regulate, I vastly prefer GDPR.

[dna_polymerase]

No self-regulation doesn't work, mostly because people do not really care and do not incentivize companies for good behavior.

But the current legislation is spotty as best and doesn't really help, Google and Facebook are still collecting tons of data while SMBs will be the guys who get sued for not complying 100%.