http://www.demos.org/blog/3/16/16/nordic-innovation-argument...

Just a few example companies: Skype, Spotify, Mojang

Example technologies: Bluetooth, pacemaker, AIS (like GPS), first LTE system. More, just from Sweden: http://www.swedenabroad.com/ImageVaultFiles/id_19367/cf_347/...

As far as people coming to the US, there are totally understandable reasons. We have excellent universities, more people (which matters: bigger local market, larger talent pool, more companies to work for, etc.), and we also have legacy clustering effects (NYC for finance and ads, SV for chips and startups.) These advantages are obviously very significant. There's absolutely no reason we cannot combine those advantages, our highly entrepreneurial culture, and the best the Nordics have to offer to be even better; that's part of what the "Silicon Valley Democrat" idea is about, and influential people there support it (that's where the idea comes from, obviously.) Even YC is doing research into the GBI.

This implication here wasn't about that, though; it was about what we'll be forced to do if we don't want to simply leave the masses unemployed and eventually storming the metaphorical--or literal--gates. That will require some or all of the above list.

Maybe social justice -- or at least your idea of it -- isn't the last, best purpose of humanity after all

Woah. Talk about a non-sequitor. What's one thing have to do with the other?

I responded by pointing out that Google was formed here, in the USA. The US is a country in which those values don't generally prevail and -- in any event -- where corporations are not responsible for upholding them.

I asked, more or less rhetorically, if there was perhaps a reason for that.

The OP responded by citing some counterexamples that more or less agree with my point, which I thought was an interesting way to argue. Skype was purchased by Microsoft (and let's not talk about Nokia, right?), while the founder of Mojang is living like a king of old Arabia in one of the most expensive homes ever sold in the US. We're apparently doing something right that those other countries are not.

More seriously, it's pretty clear by this point that a rising tide lifts all boats, even under conditions of inequitable income distribution. I don't see anyone from the US trying to break into Cuba or Venezuela, do you?