Jonah Golderg (of cheese-eating surrender monkey and liberal fascism fame) is no fan of Europe (Switzerland, excepted). Today, he frets that, if Obama is allowed to continue with his big gubmint ways, the world is likely to stop having new ideas.
Europe, he argues, is only able to keep afloat because it is propped up by US innovation:
America invents a lot of stuff. When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? Not often, and when they do, it’s usually because companies like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline increasingly conduct their research here. Indeed, the top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single country combined. We nearly monopolize the Nobel Prize in medicine, and we create stuff at a rate Europe hasn’t seen since da Vinci was in his workshop.
If America truly Europeanized, where would the innovations come from?
Comparing rates of innovation between nations is no easy task, but the Economist Intelligence Unit produces an index – the last of which came out in April 2009. Here’s the top twenty, with the Europeans appearing to hold their own:
1. Japan. 2. Switzerland. 3. Finland. 4. United States. 5. Sweden. 6. Germany. 7. Taiwan. 8. Netherlands. 9. Israel. 10. Denmark. 11. South Korea. 12. Austria. 13. France. 14. Canada. 15. Belgium. 16. Singapore. 17. Norway. 18. United Kingdom. 19. Ireland. 20. Australia.
Such evidence, I fear, is unlikely to sway Goldberg. He prints, approvingly, an email from a reader which supports his thesis as follows:
I think that everything we need to know about the state of innovation in Europe is supplied by the search list results and the fact that the fifth-highest listing is this: Top 10 Inventions of the Middle Ages.
QED, say I.
