> in terms of science, technology and programming , civil liberties

Well if you look at nobel prize winners (scientific, too), most are from the EU, not the US. Based on population levels they're roughly the same. If you look at top internet companies then yes, Google, Apple etc are in the US. But I think we have to consider that a lot of that is because of network effects.

For example, some of the best football in the world is in Spain right now. But on the pitch at Barcelona the top 3 players (of arguably the most successful team the past decade) you find one player from Argentine, a player from Brazil and a player from Uruguay, playing a style of football introduced by a Dutch player and trainer, and it's not exceptional in this regard. If you look at the world cup however (teams of native players) you find that Spain won only once and very recently, while Brazil won 5 times. Yet all the top players from Brazil come to Europe. The net result is that Spain has terrific football, yet isn't responsible for the majority of the talent or tactics, and other countries like Brazil or the Netherlands are net suppliers of talent to countries like Spain.

I feel the US, Silicon Valley mostly, is very similar, it attracts all the talent, but that's different from saying that it's responsible for it. (just like in the above example with Spain who is a net receiver of talent, and becomes the talent capital of the world within football, without doing anything particularly special outside of network effects).

For example, look at the CEO of Microsoft and Google, both India born, partially India educated. SV attracts them, but isn't necessarily responsible for them. You may use that as an argument that SV somehow is geared towards innovation better. But I think you'll be hard pressed to identify any big forces outside of network effects. In very direct ways we can see it with e.g. Skype being bought by Microsoft (a swedish company), or a guy like Linus Torvalds doing the vast majority of his work from his native Finland and deciding in his 40s only a few years ago to move to the US.

Beyond that I think we fail to sometimes put the achievements in perspective. You mentioned Google and Apple etc, but if you look at the fortune 500 for example you find in 2015 that China had 3 companies in the top 10, the US had 2. In the Fortune 500 all together the US had 128 companies, China 106 and rapidly growing (they had just 10 in 2000 when the US had 180). UK-France-Germany, a combined population of just 210 million people, has almost 100 places in the Fortune 500. Add Japan to get to a population of the US, and you're ahead of the US in spots on the fortune 500.

I mean you mention Apple and it's an absolutely wonderful company on whose hardware I'm typing now, but my machine is loaded with parts from third parties who drive a ton of the innovation, too, like Samsung parts, a company whose revenue is much bigger than that of Apple. And we're seeing genuine innovation from China, too, like WeChat (there was a thread on this recently).

Anyway I'm rambling on with lots of examples and anecdotal evidence. I don't really like it as there's a lot of counter anecdotes to present. But I think there's a case to be made that the US isn't any better or better structured or more competitive, but benefits from tremendous network effects still, and that this is more and more being contested by the rest of the world. We're seeing a wave of new companies that don't feel the need to move to the US to commercialise the product, or to find themselves in a startup hub, or to be able to network with financiers. From startups like Spotify who're comfortable staying in Sweden or like WeChat in China, to the biggest companies in the world, both the traditional (e.g. utilities) to the more innovative (e.g. Samsung). Sure I pick Apple any day, but I can easily pick a load of non-US companies that innovate more than say Yahoo. Not to mention it depends on the industry, too. A ton of innovation in e.g. automotive or renewables is in Europe or Asia. And we're seeing markets being addressed that I don't think the US is geared to address, like Xiaomi in China and India, which are becoming increasingly more important.

As for civil liberties, a loooong road to go for China, but no big deal in e.g. the European Union. The US doesn't lead the world in civil liberties. For example the Economist intelligence unit does an annual ranking, the US came in 19th last year. But better than 2010 it came in last place of all 'full democracies' in place 46.