“the vast majority of new inventions and technological breakthroughs are made in the US”
- I sincerly doubt that. What’s your source?
The US leads the world in many important fields of technology, but so do Europe. No single European country has more of researchers, scientists, hi-tech companies and so on, but this fact doesn’t mean that US completely dominates the world of technology and science.
Just have a look at the large amount of European technology based companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list or check out the large numbers of European Nobel prize laurates, you’ll find out Europe isn’t exactly dwarfed by the US in these departments.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/03/29/forbes-global-2000-biz-07forbes2000-cz_sd_0329global_land.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_by_country
Some Europeans and Americans suffer from inferiority complexes towards the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and that might be a problem to them as individuals, but in general I fail to see a “problem”. To a large extent it’s a matter of a sound will to compete.
Some Americans seem to believe that most Europeans a) hate the US and b) wishes to compete with the US on all levels. In fact, few such Europeans exist. The Europeans who hate the US are usually people who don’t care much for, or even oppose, all sorts of military and technological competition and progress whatsoever.
First of all let be clear on one issue, do not treat Europe as a single country, you are not a single country, you are 25 different countries with different languages, different governments, and different culture. So comparing the whole of Europe to the US is not a realistic. Please tell in how many fields of science and technology a “single country” in Europe is leading the world or ahead of the United States?