In physics news, the Higgs boson may have been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider. I've seen a few stories about Higgs and how this relates to the Texas Superconducting Super Collider project that was scrapped in the 1990s (click any of the links for more information about the physics behind all this). Supposedly, if the U.S. had continued to build out the SCC, "we" would have made this Higgs discovery a decade ago.
What I call attention to is the question if it matters that the discovery was made in the U.S. or not.
From a spending perspective, I'm sure Texas would have loved to see the billions of federal dollars spent in the state. That was a loss for Texas. Depending on what you believe about government spending and multiplier effects, it was either a savings or a loss to the U.S. economy.
But from an innovation perspective, being bitter about the discovery being made by European scientists and countries I think would be short-sighted. I'm relying on Amar Bhidé's book The Venturesome Economy to inform this viewpoint. If you agree with Bhidé's argument, it doesn't matter where scientific discoveries originate. Rather, it is the ability of countries to apply and develop practical innovations based on the discovery that matters in the long run. I have no idea what sort of practical innovations could come from the Higgs discovery. But it is hard to imagine that they would be limited to just the European continent.
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