The United States is becoming a dysfunctional country: politically, it’s lurching from one embarrassment to the next, but economically and technologically, it’s rising at an amazing speed.
That’s one of the first things that came to my mind when I read a new report by Merrill Lynch stating that “an economic revival is taking hold in the United States,” and saw a separate report from the US Patent and Trademark Office showing that the technological gap between this country and its closest rivals remains as large as ever.
To be sure, the United States has egg on its face when it comes to its image abroad.
Just when the headlines of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s defection were beginning to fade from the front pages, new Snowden revelations about alleged US electronic surveillance operations in
