Scientific knowledge is a public good with large "spillover" benefits. In 2004 William Nordhaus of Yale University argued that companies only capture 2.2% of the total returns from their innovations.
America accounts for 4% of the world's population, yet produces a third of high-impact scientific papers and a third of global research-and-development spending. It almost certainly runs a surplus in science with the rest of the world, providing much more to foreigners than it receives in return.
People. American scientific institutions have twice as many foreign students as in the early 2000s. Many return home, taking ideas with them. Around 15% of MIT graduates live abroad.
Ideas. In 1996 only about 40% of citations of American scientific publications were from foreign researchers. By 2019 foreign scientists accounted for about 60% of America's citations.
Technologies. From the early 1990s to 2024, America exported nearly $5trn-worth of high-tech capital goods, more than any other country. Americans' direct investments abroad are worth some $10trn, far more than any other country. According to Nancy Stokey of the University of Chicago, capital goods are a quantitative proxy for technological spillovers because new technology is often embodied in them.
Since 1901, researchers based in America have won 55% of academic Nobel prizes; more than a third of these laureates were foreign-born. Immigrant inventors produce an outsize share of patents. The Paulson Institute reckons that in 2022 almost two-thirds of top-tier artificial-intelligence researchers working in America hailed from overseas. Between 2019 and 2022 the share of non-native AI researchers who left America for China after their PhD doubled, from 4% to 8%.
American consumers subsidise research and development through higher domestic prices. Prescription drugs are more expensive domestically than abroad. National-accounts data suggest that, on average, American corporations earn returns on domestic capital that are more than 50% higher than abroad.
The Public is merely a multiplied "me."