<story><title>The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-22/south-korea-tops-global-innovation-ranking-again-as-u-s-falls</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tlb</author><text>What drags the US down most in these rankings is &amp;quot;tertiary efficiency&amp;quot;: roughly the fraction of people in grad school or with graduate degrees.&lt;p&gt;Ranking countries is a dodgy business, even more than ranking colleges. A different set of weights or ways of measuring things could give you totally different answers.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re looking for a way to claim the rankings are biased, you might argue that this up-ranks countries that value credentials over actual innovation. Or you might claim that these days, an undergrad education is enough to go out in the world and innovate and that countries that send more students through grad school are wasting their time. Or you might claim that the US is a developed country with a developing country attached, which drags down the averages. And probably California, NY, MA and a few other states considered independently would rank highly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>electrograv</author><text>When casual readers see results titled &amp;quot;Bloomberg Innovation Index&amp;quot; (myself included, a while ago), there&amp;#x27;s a tendency due to brand reputation (Bloomberg!) to believe that this is some scientifically and statistically rigorous analysis of a well-defined &amp;quot;innovation&amp;quot; that can be trusted. This is dangerous, and IMO disappointing (I know, I was naive and optimistic) regarding the statistical credibility of many &amp;quot;reputable&amp;quot; sources.&lt;p&gt;In reality (as you describe), these are completely arbitrary human-designed heuristic scores with most likely no statistical significance.&lt;p&gt;I really wish we could qualify these &amp;quot;rankings&amp;quot; with a more honest term , like:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;statistically useless, arbitrarily rated average of multiple human designed score scales, meant to loosely relate to some quality we want to measure, but in reality is more a game of politics and adversarial score optimization.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn&amp;#x27;t have the same &amp;#x27;ring&amp;#x27; to it as &amp;quot;top country rankings in innovation&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>The U.S. drops out of the top 10 in innovation ranking</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-22/south-korea-tops-global-innovation-ranking-again-as-u-s-falls</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tlb</author><text>What drags the US down most in these rankings is &amp;quot;tertiary efficiency&amp;quot;: roughly the fraction of people in grad school or with graduate degrees.&lt;p&gt;Ranking countries is a dodgy business, even more than ranking colleges. A different set of weights or ways of measuring things could give you totally different answers.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re looking for a way to claim the rankings are biased, you might argue that this up-ranks countries that value credentials over actual innovation. Or you might claim that these days, an undergrad education is enough to go out in the world and innovate and that countries that send more students through grad school are wasting their time. Or you might claim that the US is a developed country with a developing country attached, which drags down the averages. And probably California, NY, MA and a few other states considered independently would rank highly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TimPC</author><text>These rankings need to account for mobility of high profile graduate students.  For example some of the top CS programs in Canada have 50-75% of graduates leave for the US tech sector. Canada gets rewarded for it&amp;#x27;s STEM grads who end up working for US companies in the US market while the US gets punished for it&amp;#x27;s lower domestic STEM grad production. If the rest of the world is producing a fairly substantial number of educated people who work for US companies on US innovations does it make sense to say it&amp;#x27;s less innovative? Sweden is #2 in Large part because there aren&amp;#x27;t categories that measure Venture Capital Invested in Country or New Business Formation.  Is it really the case that a few more net patents filed is more valuable to innovation than having companies like Dropbox, AirBnB and Stripe? (Feel free to pick your start-ups of choice here).</text></comment>