Can France Create Its Own MIT?

That's their decision, and serves their purposes.

Per alumni, it has the same rate of Nobel prize winners as MIT https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-st...

Is number of patents awarded really a good measure of productivity?

In case someone doesn't believe my observations from conferences.

Just look below. Neither INRIA nor EP are in the top 30 institutions with publications at ICML and only INRIA is in the top 50 (at 14, not bad!) at NIPS. EP isn't in the top 50 institutions with papers at NIPS.

https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers-institutio...

https://medium.com/machine-learning-in-practice/nips-accepte...

EP isn't a player in academic CS basically. (the numbers work out to be the same if you attend CVPR or ICRA or any number of other conferences).

> Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is.

Slightly off-topic, but for some reason I've run into a seemingly disproportionate (in terms of world population) number of good computer scientists who were born in Greece.

> And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita.

I agree with your main point, caveat that I don't know anything about the current state of French science because I don't know any French.

With this aside though, Australia has an order of magnitude more land than France, and half as many people, so individual Australians should have an absurd amount of raw resource available to them. In a sense, Australia should have a GDP per capita 20x France's purely on raw resources.

Comparing material wealth and academic success isn't really fair. Academics depends on small communities, and is a highly cultural endeavor. Wealth depends on resources and stability, which is less so.

EP and ENS are both excellent schools. I am a mathematician and mathematics is more traditionally associated with ENS than with EP, but I've met excellent mathematicians, at all level of career (from PhD student to full professor) from both schools.

My impression is that all the French Grandes Ecoles are trying to expand their range of activities and subjects, reducing the level of diversification.

ENS is also more geared towards forming professors.

I'm not sure - but it's clear that having talented developers is not sufficient.

What are the advantages to starting a startup in France vs joining an established company?

> Why does it seem like so many relevant tech companies are American

The ones that are relevant to you.

To me all but very few of the relevant tech companies are irrelevant, and the miracle of Silicon Valley has not been replicated inside the USA either. So the reason those companies are American is because SV is in the United States, it has little to do with America as a whole, if it did then Silicon Valley would not be an exception within the United States.

Euro nations as a rule are not hostile to start-ups in any way that is different from say Texas or Michigan.

Then, finally, there are a large number of relevant EU tech start-ups. They are working from a slight disadvantage (need to market/sell immediately in a whole bunch of languages if they want to escape their home-territory) but plenty of them do well enough that they end up listed on stock-exchanges all over the planet.

That they are not relevant to you is another matter, but IT companies account for a huge percentage of EU employment and they're all doing stuff that they feel is relevant.

So it looks as if your argument mostly revolves around what you think is relevant and what isn't.

The only American company I can't seem to get around is Google, and they're a one-off even by US standards.

Apple, FB, MS, Twitter and so on can all be done without (at least: I could do without them).

On the hardware front that leaves Intel and AMD, neither of which could be classed as start-ups today any more than you could class Siemens or Sony as one.

I can't tell you it's the same cause, but you can see this phenomenon in many industries, such as entertainment. After WWII, the U.S. was the only wealthy country left untouched and it dominated the world. Around half of world GDP was produced in the U.S. (an astounding number); all the leading scholars and scientists had moved to the U.S. (for example, think of the language and the location of pre- and post-WWII physics); the U.S. also became the world's dominant military and political power, as well as the leading cultural power (from democracy and human rights to Hollywood films to jazz to Elvis). As a result, if you wanted to be a world leader in almost anything, you had to do it in the U.S.

Also, the international language of (seemingly) everything became English, from science to, importantly in this context, computer code. When a Finnish graduate student created his new operating system, the code and his announcement were in English. Assuming you are a native English-speaker, imagine if programming languages, HTML, and network traffic were in French - how many fewer English-speakers would step over that hurdle and learn to code, to hack? How many teenagers would give it a try out of curiosity if they have to learn another language to do it? Imagine you are a French musician; what is the chance that a song you record in French will be heard in the U.S. or worldwide? Ever hear a French song in the U.S.? See French musicians on major tours in the U.S.? Can Americans name one French musician? But can people in France name American musicians? Do English-speaking U.S. musicians tour France? All the time, AFAIK.

Those things persist today, U.S. businesses still have an economic advantage; they can sell to an internal market of 320 million people, all in one language - and at ~$19 trillion annual GDP the largest internal market in the world by far (not counting the EU, which is a complicated topic). Then they can sell to another 100 million+ in other wealthy, English-speaking countries, and then to the rest of the world accustomed to hearing pop songs in English and watching movies in English. A French business has similar access to 60 million, plus part of Canada.

IME, Americans often don't realize how the modern world was built around them.

The history of silicon valley is fascinating. Back in the WW2 days, ampex (some would argue they were the first SV tech company) was founded in CA specifically to avoid the corrupt regulatory machine the GE and friends had created on the east coast.

Eventually old tech figured out what was going on, and almost got them shut down for patents or something. Fortunately, by the time that happened, it was clear ampex was crucial to the war effort.

At that point, the war machine somehow managed to override the politicians, so the US had significant radio communications advantages over its enemies.

This helped the war effort, but it also helped create Silicon Valley’s traditional deep-seated mistrust of Washington, and Washington’s hands-off attitude about CA tech companies.

Eventually, self-imposed regulatory capture strangled east coast tech to death, so all that’s left are universities and (now) NY’s bootstrapping startup scene (and, of course, the military tech complex near DC).

The sad part is that the current generation of Silicon Valley giants are consciously trying to dismantle the whole thing by lobbying DC, and writing regulatory capture bills like FOSTA and the CLOUD act (and many earlier examples).

Google led the charge at this years ago. After watching the MS anti-trust thing, they hoped they could preempt such “misunderstandings” with piles of lobbyist cash. (Source: their cofounders, years ago. They didn’t use the word “dismantle”, in fairness.)

It will he interesting to see what country will have enough common sense to replicate SV over the next 50 years.

In the article, it sounds like France is trying to create a low-regulation academic and economic zone for this new university push.

China keeps bouncing between “no law enforcement” and “extreme, protectionist regulation”, which sounds fundamentally unstable to me.

Also, there are probably a dozen other geographical regions playing in this space.

Anyway, to answer your question, Europe’s industrial base has historically been even more protectionist (can’t fire people, product specs are legislated, etc) than the US East coast, which is why that region won the mainframe and minicomputer wars.

I think there is a broader theme, where older governments do more and more things to protect the wealthy and borrow money to provide social services until the economy simply collapses.

And much less pressure to commercialize, there is a lot of fundamental and other research that is not immediately aimed at generating a cash-cow somewhere.