The US is far ahead in the OECD countries with developing technologies. It’s tech industry are dominating the world, with China being a distant second.

The EU cannot compete with the US and are left behind.

28 comments

  1. I’m not sure I totally understand your question, but I think the fact that we make it easier to start a business, and accept failing at a business and trying again, is a factor.

  2. Being a large country with natural resources helps, and land that doesn’t mostly suck ass helps

  3. A lot of reasons. We make investments more accessible and more beneficial to investors to encourage people to put money into businesses. We have fairly generous bankruptcy and business structure laws which allow entrepreneurs to walk away from failing businesses pretty easily with no personal detriments. We also tend to have a lot fewer regulations, or more often lack of enforcement of regulations making the government much more hands-off and slow to react to products or business practices that would be illegal in the EU.

    And perhaps most importantly, salaries for developers, engineers, etc. tend to be substantially higher and income and business taxes lower in the US than almost anywhere else in the world. Because of that, we get our pick of the litter in terms of the best minds.

  4. It’s no great mystery, the US has a 330M high productivity population and is very, very friendly to business. It also laps the field on highly skilled immigration and immigrants who own patents.

  5. One bold, politically incorrect theory I’ve heard is our relative lack of a safety net. Life is sink or swim in the US, more than in most other countries. You better have a job, either working for someone else or working for yourself. If you decide to strike out on your own or change careers, you better have a plan that you’re sure about.

  6. The brain gain the US seems to get from highly educated immigrants moving here is probably one of the biggest reasons, and the reason they’re attracted to living here I’d guess is due to the strong economy and the government’s investments in tech.

  8. My economics professor said about our success in general, not just tech.

    Diversity of ideas. We are a diverse people.
    Protection of ideas. Copyright.
    Access to capital. Loans, venture capital, etc.

  9. I’ve worked for a few companies that have had international offices in places like Germany, Sweden, and The Netherlands. Due to the employment laws in those countries, it makes it hard to ramp up for a new venture because it is much harder and more expensive to downsize if the venture doesn’t work out.

    While these job protections can be great for employees, they aren’t great for start-up companies or companies that are taking a risk with something new.

    I’ve also noticed that those people in those countries are a lot less likely to put in the sort of extra hours that are common in start-ups in the US.

    This might just be my own experience, but it also seems like the folks hired at the European offices for companies I’ve worked at are much more rigid about hiring requirements and the people all kind of have similar backgrounds. Whereas in the US I’ve worked with PhDs relevant to the field we were working in, people that dropped out of high school got their GEDs and learned how to program or whatever on the job, and everything in between.

    We are also really good at brain drain. We pull some of the best and brightest from around the world. A lot of “American” innovations are due to contributions from first generation immigrants.

  11. We are literally trying to colonize Mars right now…the UK cant figure out its pronouns yet.

  12. The DoD is responsible for far more research than people realize. There’s also a huge population gap between us and those places you listed. By sheer numbers of people involved and the amount of resources we put into it there’s a pretty clear reason for the gap.

  13. Other countries see failure as shameful. Just look at our school systems; European systems punish extremely hard for failure and can ruin your entire life over it, whereas American systems allow for tons of forgiveness and opportunity (Lile my Grandfather who nearly failed high-school but ended up becoming a nuclear engineer)

    As well as this, we attract a lot of intelligent people to come over simply cause, despite what a lot of media says, America is a pretty damn good place to live.

    Also us being extremely wealthy doesn’t hurt

  14. US has the best PhD programs in the world. The best and brightest come to train in the US and stay.

  15. We are absolutely leading the way on educating foreign-born people in critical STEM fields, then not giving them visas to apply those skills to our economy.

  16. Less regulation particularly around hiring and firing and layoffs. Lower barriers to entry. Much Lower taxes. Fewer business things where you have to ask permission before doing them. Less protectionism . Less regulation when it comes to new things. Weaker unions.

  17. The vast majority in the us are like me
    Few benefits and minimal paid time off. Wage slaves fed into the grinder of productivity.

  18. Historically part of the equation was (and still is) our massive military/defense budget. Billions of tax dollars flowing into pure research, applied research, aerospace, computers, material science, weapons systems, etc. etc. etc. over the years paid off in many ways. And of course it continues to do so today.

  19. We pay more, if you have the intellect to develop something astounding we will pay you a fuck load for it. Despite how poorly many of us believe our higher education is our best is most of the worlds best which helps support the businesses here as well as we don’t care how many foreign students they have as long as they qualify. Some studies are showing it’s easier in other places to go from poverty to middle income but I think here it’s easier than other places to get into the wealthiest groups.

  21. The tech industry has a *ton* of access to venture capital here, and as a result pays significantly better than anywhere else in the world. That attracts a lot of talent, both domestically and from other countries.

  22. The US higher education system is the best in the world, bar none. Not only does the U.S. have high-quality Universities, but a higher quantity of them than Europe.

    Educated population, more advancements in all fields.

  23. With a great idea, you can easily become rich. This is much much harder to do in other countries.

  24. The US has 330 million people (the closest developed countries are japan [128m] and germany [80m]) and an extremely well-off university system which funds these advancements.

    Note though that technological advancements do not necessarily translate to tech being used on the ground. American cities aren’t in ruins or anything, but we are a bit behind technology wise in many respects to a lot of european and asian cities. A quick trip to tokyo will make americans wonder why we don’t have most of the awesome shit they have there widely accessible.

  25. I don’t know dude, but your post reads so much more like a thinly veiled boast than an actual question I had to look into your post history, and it made perfect sense. You need to chill a bit with the American exceptionalism.

  27. Something people do not mention, we have an aggressive startup culture. Many of the tech leaders of today, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Tesla, and several others were all once small startups that even existed in someone’s home for a while. These people generally came from fairly modest means yet their business success allowed for them to become enormously wealthy and disrupting legacy businesses in the process.

    A lot of places around the world have an extreme aversion to this huge wealth creation (even though they have plenty of dynastic and family wealth) or startups basically destroying an existing business ecosystem. Many of these people were immigrants or children of immigrants who did not have a comparable opportunity to create a company in their home country or an alternative country.

    I am up in Cupertino, CA right now, home of Apple Computer. This place is full of incredibly talented people, many of them are immigrants, who if they are major success stories in Apple or another startup can become extremely wealthy. A lot of places all around the world have an aversion to this kind of activity, the Tall Poppy Syndrome that exists in places like Australia doesn’t allow this to flourish. In many countries in the world there are ecosystems are created which start to apply the brakes on startup companies once they are worth hundreds of millions of dollars that largely prevent them from becoming multi billion dollar companies.

    Apple Computer has a higher market valuation than the entire tech industry in the EU. One California company is worth more than all the Euro tech companies put together. And of those European tech companies, they are predominately in the Netherlands, which is punching way above their weight for a European country. Many of the wealthiest Europeans are associated with luxury brands, not technology. The five wealthiest French people are all associated with Luxury products. According to the 2023 list, the wealthiest person in the world is Frenchman Bernard Arnault of LVMH.

    We attract the top talent in the world, and people who want to go into tech to become very wealthy via starting new companies. There are startups right now in America that are currently fairly small that one day will make their owners billionaires. There will be super rich people of the 2030s and 2040s that are getting started right now and you might be unfamiliar with their names.

  28. Dept of Defense has highest budget of all Earth for making all kinds of high tech shit and researching and testing. A large chunk of our tax money goes to Defense and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The tech is diverse and eventually finds it’s way in the consumer market. It’s not all high tech war machines. But, no shortage of high tech weapons and targeting systems.

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