The old scientific powers are starting to lose their grip

The writing is clearly on the wall...

Whether one looks from an economic, scientific or technological perspective, the evidence points to a truly revolutionary shift from the concentration of wealth, power and knowhow in the hands of just a few toward a much more multi-polar and equitable world.

The future belongs to all who recognize the opportunity and need to work together across geographical and disciplinary boundaries to solve problems and develop innovative solutions for our common benefit....We are truly living in exciting times!

You cannot measure scientific and technological progress by simply counting the number of publications or even by the amount of research funding. Wrong metric (I loathe that word) used by bean-counters. True breakthroughs in science and technology are still pretty rare events (3 sigma?). There is a lot of mediocre stuff out there produced by half-baked minds with cheap Ph.D.'s trying to get tenure (and research funding) at all costs. "Publish or Perish" as they say. Publishing and funding frenzy may produce a lot of junk, but perhaps junk DNA is useful for some purpose!

Despite the shortcomings of the Chinese patent system as pointed out in this article, I would like to point out that many western patents are often also useless or pointless as well. I should know what I'm talking about, I used to review them.

The US imported its scientific greatness from Europe for free in the '30s, thanks to Hitler's stupidity. Over the decades since, the proportion of foreign scientific graduate students has grown, until they dominate in many fields. If the US is at some point no longer able to strip the rest of the world of its best brains, it will be in very deep trouble.

I must agree with Adam Onge, this is an incorrect metric. Science should be measured by quality (however one chooses to define it) and not quantity. It is reasonable to assume that ON AVERAGE a US trained scientist is much more productive and capable of critical thinking, independence, and productivity than a Chinese scientist. As a (currently disillusioned) scientist at a US top 10 research university, I have witnessed a large amount of mediocre science being produced at this institution. Even that which is published in so-called 'top tier' journals (science, cell, nature) can be examined for lack of quality. The lower tier journals are even worse. Again @ Adam Onge, there are a lot of cheap PhDs out there. They are just letters.

A point that this article missed is that the benefit of R&D is dispersed in global economy and an increase in R&D's share in GDP will not result in higher GDP down the line as used to happen 20 yrs ago.

As an example, consider invention of a drug done by scientist in US, then field trials in Africa or Asia, then manufacturing machines from Germany or Japan, then set up a manufacturing unit in India or China. Get it distributed worldwide and keep the profit in Tax Havens.

When it comes to Scientific research the more the merrier I say. Whats truly surprising however is just how few of the planets population are involved in this pursuit.

aside from the article. let's have a moment for that graph.

so there's six blue/greyish lines... are they supposed to be a group of some sort? okay, that's six grey-blue, one grey and one red. so the red is the highlight? why this colour combo? I'm not colour blind and that is incredibly hard to differentiate. i'll be damned if you can quickly pick out brazil from india.

there's a whole spectrum of colour? why not use colour to convey some sort of information or at the very least not interfere with the information that is being presented.

A few points to ponder:

1.Patents are about as good an indicator of a country's tech prowess as the sheer number of graduates(i.e not a very good one).China will have more patents than the US BUT it still can't reverse engineer a 1970s era soviet jet engine (Al-31) and thus still imports engines from Russia for its J-10 figher.This is 1960s tech for the US.

2.Really bleeding edge technology is never patented due to disclosure requirements of most patents.Lots of very advanced stuff is created in places like groom lake or other projects on which DARPA spends its $10billion/annum black budget but nothing gets revealed much less patented.

3.Scientific competence of nations is as much about traversing the experience curve as it is about individual brilliance and most useful institutional experience gets built over decades learning from failures and through old fashioned trial and error.

It is nobodys case that Americans are genetically smarter than the Chinese but they have been building aircraft from the days of the wright brothers and Chinese have just begun designing(as opposed to reverse engineering/license producing) its going to take them atleast 20-30 years to even match Russia in aerospace competence as institutional capability is not directly proportional to economic growth specially one largely driven by low end exports.

There is a snag.

Europe has disproportionately more so-called breakthrough papers - ones which really open up completely new field. Comparatively fewer come from USA, few from Japan, and none from China, India or Brazil.

As others pointed: most of science and patents anywhere are junk, but China and India produce only junk.

Chinese seem to deliberately adopt a strategy of catching up by copying Western inventions with minimum modifications. It will do lots of good to their country, but contributes little to the progress overall.

China was in the fore-front of scientific and technological know-how prior to the Western Renaissance. In fact a book written by MENZIES described that Western Renaissance occurred or as a result of a visitation of a (Chinese) Ming ship to Europe.

Whatever it may be, Chinese are very scientific as well as a very practicable people. Lots of knowledge whether in the form of breakthrough medicine application, agriculture, practical every day usage and tools including the compass and rocket (in the form of fire-works initially) were invented or derived from the Chinese.

As such, with the current trend of globalisation and a premium were accorded to patent/ copy-right/ industrial design / chose-in action etc etc holders in protection and registration, it is no wonder that the Chinese are rushing to register their know-how or rights to them.

What is GERD?

How does the percentage of published articles take international collaborations into account?

At least in physics, the Europeans scientists think of their American counterparts (to say "colleagues" would be too complimentary in their view) as glorified technicians...

And we (even if I am Canadian I was trained by the American system) think of our European colleagues as pampered elitists who can't be beothered to get their hands dirty.

Dear Economist
please get a decent spam filter for the comments.
Please!

Non-military scientific research nowadays increasingly require people from different countries to collaborate.

Ultimately, it is all of mankind that benefits.

Dear sir
Unfortunately ,Scientific competence of Nations-Estates if fully considered from a political point of view as done in this article , always and unbiasedly must reflect itself on Nations military defense systems efficiency and fire power .

Dear Sir
By the other side , if you consider Research on Science -especially on Basic Sciences , one could as well consider the following opinion from unknow source on Yuotube Rock song also fully applicable to most of the present days published scientific articles , even into those highly regarded internatinal scientific journal :
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"music in the past is so good because musicians loved what they did and cared for their craft. they trully loved music themselves and cared for nothing else. some got rich, some did ok but they all strove to be the best at what they did. now it more about money and how fast they can get it with as little effort as possible. many aren't even original and instead copy songs and styles for that instant fame and fortune.but I see a future were new talent will appear."

Dear Sir
It is worth to take into account the comments of Adam Orange.They are surely pertinent .However most of the Basic Science done in last 20 years (after the fallen of the comunism in Russia ) is merely "Fashion" ,altough considered of high quality and published in high top international Scientific Journals .One case is the famous Theory of everything (SuperString) in High Energy Physics , Quantum Gravity of UK'School of Physics and the Brazilian C.Tsallis Statistics .In Pure mathematics , the proof of the Last Fermat Theorem, Chaos theory ,catastrophe Teory ,Dynamical Systems from a purely Topological differential point of view added with the Poincare topological classification theorem on tree dimensional spheres are examples of this sad trending in Math .
And about the badly needed highly dvanced applied math of Climate and ecological Sciences ?.No much has been developed on that important branch of exact sciences to became world wide acknowledge , in my humble opinion .

Interesting article but held off from hitting the recommend button - the whole Aristo angle was getting tiresome.

Not surprising if other countries with industrial bases increase R&D spending - I believe I read somewhere that manufacturing as an industry sector typically has to perform more research than the service sector. America had appeared intent on hindering its own manufacturing base (maybe egged on by enthusiasts of the service sector, who feel it is good to force something away some strange view of economic development). Also, I bet a large share of R&D in America is tied to military matters.

However, much of the line of argument has a strong hint of deja vu a la the Soviets, 1958 and Japan 1980s. Interesting point from "The Red Flag," page 417 - By the 1970s the USSR had a quarter of the world's scientists, half the world's engineers, and a third of the world's physcists, but manpower did not make a high-tech economy.

Similarly, I believe Japan had patent inflation from competitors trying to box in, encroach on or block out others with specific technology developments.

Recently I believe there were a spate of articles about plagiarism, dubious research, etc. in China, while I think Korea had some misteps in stem cell or cloning.

For the near future, I suspect many in India, China and possibly other places would probably like to remain in the US, or Canada or some other developed country. My suspicion is the brain drain potential of the US is still there, and bet it would be validated by any loosening of H1B rules.

I don't want to sound self satisfied, and I actually welcome other countries developing their knowledgebases/skills bases, but I think the edge is still with North America and Western Europe.

I did notice almost everywhere the number of papers published seems to be trending downwards - maybe people realize no one wants to read boring, badly written documents.....