Citation needed? Never heard or noticed any bias like this before.
Companies tend to fund applied research.
Funding in Europe, whether academic or industry motivated, is simply lacking across all scientific, engineering, and social science disciplines.
*Edit*. The question is why the united states has the "best research universities". That is a very general-level question and the Parent made a very general, and very wrong, claim in response. Regardless of whether some specific fields might have more industrial funding than others, it's easy to google the overall portion: and industry funding is quite minor.
https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2018-11/UniSource1....
GP never implied it was the largest contributor, and yes, depending on your field a significant amount of funding does come from the private sector.
Slow down there bud. Where did I say that?
Unless you’re talking about AI/ML, then yes, university labs receive more from companies, than government funding agencies.
If I miserepresented you, then I am sorry.
> Unless you’re talking about AI/ML, then yes, university labs receive more from companies, than government funding agencies.
This is simply untrue. Companies comprise less than 10% of overall university research funding, and AI/ML is far from dominant. It's easy to verify this.
While I would tend to agree that private funding for research is way better in the US, Bell Labs is not necessarily a good example.
True, the tech. output of the outfit was amazing, but they had massive govt support (among other things, they were given an official monopoly by the USG).