Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

fulton westbrook — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 01:11:12 -0000

"The Japan/Korea patents are probably for alot of tiny little innovations on existing products."

99% of all patents are for tiny little innovations on existing products.

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

MPbjt@BMPJT.COM — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 11:24:48 -0000

The Japan/Korea patents are probably for alot of tiny little innovations on existing products.

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

Robert Schwartz — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 01:16:48 -0000

Ithink the big spike on the west coast of the US is the san francisco bay. not LA. So its Stanford/Berkley/Santa Cruz, not Cal Tech.

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

PLN — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 23:29:24 -0000

Lovely graphs, although if Javier's right some may be lovely but misleading. The patent graph, also, should be taken with a grain of salt; you file patents in the US only if you care about competing in the US, which biases the graph towards cities with multinationals, etc. The picture is a bit unclear on how it's aggregating USPTO vs. WIPO data, etc.; but no matter how it does it, it's clearly biased against local-knowledge and incremental innovation embodied purely in production processes rather than legal rights. And, of course, this only emphasizes how important it is to get our rules on IP right--have you checked out Levine and Boldrin's -Against Intellectual Monopoly- draft?

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:18:59 -0000

It may be worth pointing out that taking the EU, as a unit is interesting, the EU not being a state, but a confederation, and there being very few EU-wide institutions.

Also, the U.S. population is less than 2/3 of the EU's. So we've still got a higher per capita citation rate. Take that!

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:14:01 -0000

Hmm. Then the picture is definitely misleading!

We could break it down. Physics citiations, chemistry citations, biology, etc. Some ares will have more economic relevance than others. It is probably hard to pin producitivy gains on particular discoveries, but I wonder where the most efficieny-enhancing primary disoveries come from?

Thanks!

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

Javier — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 13:46:53 -0000

An interesting report:

In the mid-1990s, the United States' declining share of world science output was intersected by that of the ascending European Union. Today, the EU has reached almost five percent more than the United States' share. The Asia Pacific region enjoys the most dramatic increase in share percentage, up by approximately 12 percent. If current trends continue, the Asia Pacific region will likely outstrip the United States by 2011.

Scientific output is measured here as follows: "The study was conducted using citation data from the more than 8,700 prestigious, high-impact journals archived in the National Science Indicators(R) database."

Of course, world scientific output is expanding rapidly even if the US is experiencing modest relative decline.