For most of the postwar era, the United States has enjoyed superior leadership in innovation, whether measured by student skills, research and development spending, patents, or high-technology industry output. As Western European economies caught up with the global innovation frontier and Japan followed, this superiority began to erode. The U.S.-led IT revolution of the 1990s seemed to slow down this innovation convergence, but only until the bubble burt in the early 2000s.
