Is America’s future as lousy as it looks? Depends on what you look at. The mainstream statistics are pathetic: America’s productivity, which must rise if our prosperity is to increase, changed over the past year by a nice, round 0.0%. Four years after the recession ended, our economy is growing at a puny 1.7% annual rate, barely half the long-term average. But those figures illuminate what we know how to measure, not necessarily what’s most important for our future. The good news for us Americans is that we hold a huge economic strength — though how huge is hard to measure — that’s unique in a country our size. The worry is that we’re in danger of losing it.
Innovation and creativity are what make economies hum, and they have always been America’s biggest advantage. They’re difficult traits to quantify, so we sometimes overlook their importance. Major institutions have tried to measure them anyway — but before we look at the results, what do you think? Reflect on your travels and experiences and ask where you’re most likely to find a life-changing new technology, a startling business model that upends an industry, or a torrent of new products and services — most of which will fail, but some of which will thrive. No country has a monopoly, but most people I encounter, regardless of nationality, still think the odds are highest in the U.S.
Research, imperfect though it is, supports that intuitive sense. The Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management has compiled a Global Creativity Index that ranks the U.S. No. 2, just behind Sweden and ahead of Finland. The U.S. is the only major economy in the top 10; Japan is No. 30, China No. 58. The new World Innovation Index from the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization ranks the U.S. fifth, also among a sea of tiny economies, led by Switzerland and Sweden. For innovativeness at a mammoth scale, no country comes close to the U.S.
Which raises the critical question of why. The answer is clear but even harder to measure: It’s the culture. We root for the person who takes a chance, and we mostly look past failures. I’m not sure where else a guy who burned $45 million of venture capital funding in a failed business could get his next idea financed, but Daniel Dreymann, co-founder of forgotten Goodmail Systems, has done it with Mowingo, a mobile commerce venture. If you didn’t know about him, it’s because his story isn’t rare. We’re hooked on new ideas of every kind — big, little, silly, profound. Innovation is more than NASA’s Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The Taco Bell Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco Supreme is an innovation (and a highly successful one), and Sweden and Switzerland aren’t going to give it to you.
The danger is that America’s secret, its culture, may be changing for the worse. Future indicators are troubling. A World Values Survey that asked people how important it is “to think up new ideas and be creative” placed the U.S. 10th, and major economies — Germany, France, the U.K. — ranked higher. A gauge of creativity in children that has been used in the U.S. for over 50 years, the Torrance test, shows that after rising for decades, kids’ creativity began declining around 1990, and the accumulated drop is now significant, with the deepest declines showing up in elementary school children.
No one is sure why that’s happening, and we may never know. The culture is the air we breathe, composed of a thousand things. Meanwhile, other countries — China, most of Europe, parts of the Middle East — are trying hard to build a culture of innovation among their kids, mainly through the schools.
The long-term trend may well be that cultural differences, like so many other factors in today’s global economy, are evening out. If so, that would be bad news for the U.S. competitively but good for the world economy as a whole, benefiting all of us, in which case let’s cheer it on. But let’s not achieve a new global consistency by diminishing America’s world-leading innovation culture. Let’s make the rest of the world rise to it.
This story is from the September 16, 2013 issue of Fortune.
