We often hear talk about the U.S. falling behind in this or that area. But one measure of forward progress is innovation, which can be concretely measured by the number of patents filed per country. On that score, the U.S. is the indisputable leader, and no other country is even close. This infographic shows that the U.S., at 3.03 million patents filed between 1977 and 2015, is almost 3 times as prolific as the next country, Japan. In fact, just the state of California outweighs all other countries but Japan!
