Chinese/Korean Bakeries, Forget the Fish Eat the Tourists, and Education Levels

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Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.Chinese and Korean Innovation BakeriesFor decades, only a few countries brewed most of the world’s innovations. Or, as a new study by the IMF quantifies it, “From 1995 to 2014, three-quarters of the world’s patented innovations originated in the Group of 5 (G5) technology leaders—namely the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.” But the IMF study also notes that this is changing. It finds that China and Korea have joined the traditional R&D powers. The IMF cites two metrics illustrating this change. First is overall R&D spending: “China’s R&D spending is now second only to that of the United States ($460 billion) and is much larger than Japan’s ($150 billion). Korea, at $70 billion a year, spends close to the average of large European countries such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.” Second, the IMF looks at the number of patents (a metric we are not fond of) and the number of times new patents cite older patents, and from where. It turns out that a lot of today’s citations are increasingly citing patents from China and Korea (see second graph below). Some are worried by the rise of Asian innovation. We are not (and neither is the IMF study). Remember the world economy is not a pie with finite slices, it is a bakery. China and Korea are adding to the number of treats.Forget the Fish, Eat the TouristsMaybe a decade ago we were chatting with our Uncle in New York City, while eating a bialy, about all the tourists then inundating the city. Our Uncle, very much a wise-cracking New Yorker, turned serious and noted how all these tourists were degrading life for those living there. It was impossible to get around and markets, museums and other areas were overrun with people walking slowly, cameras at the ready. As the traditional summer tourism season closes out, we were reminded of this conversation by a column in the New York Times on Europe’s “overtourism” problems. Farhad Manjoo noted, “…the world’s most popular destinations cannot expand to accommodate an infinite flood of visitors. Advocates of curbing tourism say too many visitors are altering the character of historic cities, and making travel terrible, too.” Indeed the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO–is there an overorganization problem too?) reports that tourism in 2018 is well above forecasts, something that has been true for a number of years. In the larger picture Manjoo notes, “when the jet age began, around 25 million international trips were taken. Last year, the number was 1.3 billion.” When we were in Venice a few years ago, we noted both that it was a fabulous place to be but also that almost no one actually lives there anymore. It is no longer a city, it is a museum. Not everyone can do so but try to travel offseason and off the beaten path too. But eventually those paths will also be beaten. It is a trade-off of the world becoming wealthy.The Most Educated SocietiesWhich countries are most educated, or at least have the highest percentage of their population with a tertiary (college or above) education? It turns out Canada is number one, followed by Japan, Israel, South Korea and the U.K. The U.S. comes in number six, just ahead of Australia and Finland. All of these countries are above the OECD average of 35.7 percent. Italy, Tukey and Mexico bring up the rear among OECD countries. Note the correlation, or lack thereof, to today’s first story.