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.

If you'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.

This is similar to ranking systems that consider McGill the Harvard of Canada or consider Babson College the #1 for Entrepreneurship.

I wish these articles had a "Ways in which our claim could be wrong" section. Maybe every article should. E.g. Here is what i think, but here are aspects of it that I haven't looked into that could make me change my stance.

At the very least, you'd know the author made some effort to be truthful, and not just sensationalist/misled.

Perhaps we can have a browser extension that aggregates and ranks crowdsourced feedback on articles such as this one? :P

OK this is hilariously misguided as a metric. Also, I have some familiarity with the SK tech industry. They're catching up to US standards and hold themselves back by prioritizing the old-school mechanisms for upward movement which hinge on seniority/age and pedigree.

Innovation has relatively little to do with nation-states. It has quite a lot to do with city-regions, however: those, much more than nation-states, are what produce the social and economic dynamism that fuels innovation.

What the Bloomberg and other similar metrics do is take real indicators of innovation and then averages them across randomly-sized buckets, making it genuinely useless for comparative purposes. Singapore fares very well because it's a city-state. China fares very poorly because it has three-quarters of a billion people who aren't doing anything particularly from an innovation perspective. America has the same "problem" on a smaller scale. But innovative places like Shenzhen or the SF Bay Area can approach Singaporean levels of innovation, while China and America's innovation output as a whole certainly outdo Singapore's.

So this ranking is showing neither the total innovation output of a country, nor the "innovation density" of places where innovators actually congregate. So what is it showing? Basically nothing.

(This is not to dispute the thesis that America, as a whole, is having national-scale problems with how it fosters innovation. Personally I agree with that, but would not use this garbage metric to try to support that thesis.)

Still, is it just me, or are the most posts here reflex-like defenses of the US?

What would you suggest instead? It would have to yield actionable results, mind you...

I don't think that's true about Korea, and it is the core reason for the lack of vibrant startups in Korea.

Bad ideology is dragging us down.