EDIT: for people who didn't click the links, it shows America has more scientific papers among the top 1% of most-cited papers... than all the other countries put together
Bell invented the telephone, but where did he go to get funding and start a company/industry? Where did Marconi and Daniell go ? To Britain, which occupied about the same spot as US as industrial/scientific leader once upon a time.
The point is that a country like Norway say could do nothing but sit on their oil income - and every year life would still get better as they buy new technology from America. But for America, of whoever the world leader is, this is not an option. It's got nothing to do with copying or taking credit or whatever - it's just recognising that the flow of benefit from innovation is not symmetrical.
If you'd take the population differences into account, the numbers would be a bit different. Given that Sweden has only 10 million habitants, it seems to push around twice the amount of US scientific output/capita. (Norway and Finland achieve similar efficiency with 5m people) Yeah, what US is doing is pretty impressive, but it's not like Europeans have been much of freeriding either.
And then there was the whole World War thing, snatching top scientists for cold war etc... The polarization of world during the recent history is a bit more complicated issue than the US just kicking ass in everything. And the future is kind of interesting too. (youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)
The per capita figures make the other countries look better (although ultimately that doesn't change the underlying point), although the fact that USA has more of the top 1% of papers than all the other countries put together tells a different story. And the other countries do get to free-ride on this... I mean you could set up a communist state with a religious dictatorship, and still it would get the benefit of what the American economy comes up with. You have to question how much of someone's quality of life is down to the chosen system of government, and how much is down to technology (and possibly other things like foreign investors and foreign buyers) they have access to.
A cursory glance at Google search results in... ENGLISH... ?
for people who didn't click the links, it shows... either
A) ENGLISH speaking countries dominate the most-cited papers (tah dahhh).
B) American papers cite American papers (parochialism versus merit).
I think you're clutching at straws. 90% of scientific papers are published in English anyway, plus the study never said it excluded non-English papers. And the figures show that America dominates the most cited papers - it shows England, Canada and Australia doing fairly well but not really better than non-English-speaking countries. Sure you could remove some bias if you really tried... But we could also look at other metrics such as, say, what investors put their money in: like how the iShares ETF based on the S&P Global Technology Index concentrates a massive 77% of its holdings on US companies http://us.ishares.com/product_info/fund/overview/IXN.htm . Or basically just pay attention to the breakthroughs that get reported by the press: top ten discoveries of the decade, http://news.discovery.com/human/discoveries-of-the-decade.ht..., almost all American researchers; best inventions of the decade, http://www.inventhelp.com/Newsletter/2009_12/time-magazine-b... , mostly american companies; or look at pharmaceutical companies by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pharmaceutical_compani... ; I mean I'm just picking the first such articles that pop up. You'll probably say that these are biased to Americans... but really, if you just pay attention to what gets reported in something like New Scientist (British publication) you'll see how much America contributes.
Plus, the counter points that people cite tend to be lone inventors who either left their home nation to set up shop in the US (or UK when it was the leader), or whose inventions/discoveries were not capitalised upon. Whereas America is full of not just great research, but the rise of entire industries that other nations can then participate in.
EDIT: for people who didn't click the links, it shows America has more scientific papers among the top 1% of most-cited papers... than all the other countries put together
Bell invented the telephone, but where did he go to get funding and start a company/industry? Where did Marconi and Daniell go ? To Britain, which occupied about the same spot as US as industrial/scientific leader once upon a time.
The point is that a country like Norway say could do nothing but sit on their oil income - and every year life would still get better as they buy new technology from America. But for America, of whoever the world leader is, this is not an option. It's got nothing to do with copying or taking credit or whatever - it's just recognising that the flow of benefit from innovation is not symmetrical.