No one does it better than the U.S. according to Sebastian Mallaby:

In the race to turn scientific ideas into businesses, the United States is hard to beat. There's no dividing wall between academic labs and commerce, and scientists surf from one world to the other on waves of money and cultural approval.

This portrait is too rosy. The University of Wisconsin -- more specifically, WARF -- is as good as it gets in tech transfer, but we face plenty of challenges, both economic and cultural.

Mallaby's main point is that the "science lobby" in the U.S. should stop invoking Chinese scientific and technological prowess as a national threat.

What matters is the way science is diffused through an economy: the availability of venture capital, the flexibility of workers, the quality of corporate leadership, the competence of government policy, the reliability of public infrastructure -- all help to determine how science is absorbed. The United States scores well in nearly all these areas, which is why it's defied alarmist predictions for a quarter of a century and will continue to do so.

Under Mallaby's view, scientific advances in China actually help Americans, who use that knowledge for our own gain. We are able to do this, Mallaby claims, because our economic institutions are magnets for top scientists. Thus, he enters a longstanding debate about chickens and eggs: If you want to build a vibrant, entrepreneurial economy, which comes first, the science or the legal and economic infrastructure?

The answer (probably) is that they develop together. China has been developing the science quickly, but it also has been developing market institutions. Mallaby is more confident of the U.S. position than I am. China's trajectory over the past 30 years is nothing short of astonishing.

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