The U.S. is losing it

That's the conclusion of a study on innovation and competition. Globally Singapore is now ranked #1 in coming up with new stuff. The U.S. has now fallen to #6 behind Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark and South Korea. Seems that public policy and government supported-research are crucial to innovation, despite what the anti-government partisans keep repeating about the supremacy of the private sector. They seem to overlook how crucial government-funded research has been to the development of innovations like nuclear energy, Internet, transistors, and space travel. You can see the whole report from the ITIF here. In the past ten years China has shown the greatest improvement in innovation says the report, followed closely by Singapore. The saddest note: among forty nations, the U.S. has shown the least improvement in the past decade. Dead last, as in brain-dead.