Protect the Value of American Invention

This commentary was originally published in Deseret News on November 12, 2022.

America is the world’s most innovative country. Or at least it was.

By many measures, that title now belongs to China. The authoritarian powerhouse issued more patents than the United States for the first time in 2019, and it has left us in the dust ever since.

True, raw patent data does not tell the whole story, and China has used nonmarket incentives to pump its numbers. But in recent years, China has also outpaced the United States in the number of scientific publications published in peer-reviewed journals, the number of scientists and engineers graduating with advanced degrees, and other similar metrics.

The trends all point in the same direction: China aims to out-innovate the United States in the most critical technologies of the future.