Countries inculcate values, educate people on the public dime, support R&D, etc. People should be proud when those policies bear fruit. E.g. Sergei Brin's family emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, because of Soviet discrimination against Jews. E.g. they were graded harder on university entrance exams, or given tougher exams altogether. He went to public high school and college, and went to graduate school at Stanford on a National Science Foundation fellowship. And Stanford, as an institution, heavily benefits from public spending on research.
So why shouldn't Americans take a little credit for Brin's success?
You would have no trouble sketching a ranked list of countries more and less likely to produce Google. You would be shocked to see Google emerge from Burma. You would be surprised to see the world's powerhouse search engine emerge from Greece, Spain, or Italy. Even among the top-tier countries, if you had to put money on it, you'd need an extremely good payoff to bet on anyone but the US.
If the US has "overwhelmingly nothing to do" with the success of Google, you have to believe Brin could have moved to Greece, or even Burma, and successfully built that company. Most of us probably don't even believe he could have succeeded in Germany, or the Netherlands.
Even if you stipulate away all the extrinsic network-effects stuff --- ie, stipulate he'd have gotten funded despite parking his company in Greece --- you would not place the same bet for his hypothetical attempt to buid Google in Greece.
You're completely missing the point. The message I'm responding to says:
"So why shouldn't Americans take a little credit for Brin's success?"
I'm not saying that living in America had nothing to do with it, it obviously did. I'm saying that the overwhelming majority of Americans had nothing to do with it, ergo being proud to be American is, in general, about as warranted as being proud that your favorite team won a tournament.
If you're a founding father, fought in the revolutionary war, influenced legislation in a historically significant ways, or did something of the sort, you may have a claim to be "proud", otherwise, you're a spectator, just like most people.
I'm not sure I can get my head around a debt owed to America the country that is not implicitly therefore owed to the American people. Teachers taught at schools that produced the professionals that built Google. Engineers designed the roads that workers built. I could just go on and on listing this stuff. Google benefited from an infrastructure built by all Americans.
I think there's an element of the narrative fallacy implicated in the idea that the historical figures have a cause to be proud of American achievements, but ordinary people don't. Ordinary people are instrumental in everything achieved by those historical figures. The contributions of historical figures are immediately available to our consideration, because our stories revolve around them. Availability is usually a pernicious bias rather than a helpful signal.
later: it's also worth considering whether the fallacy might be in our concept of "pride", and who "deserves" "pride". There are practical reasons to attribute American successes to America; it reinforces them, motivates us to continue doing what works. There are fewer practical reasons to accord accolades to historical figures.
This is severely misguided. If you're Tim Berners Lee, then yes, Google success could be a source of pride, because you enabled the success of this company by inventing the web. If you were one of Larry Page's professor, then maybe you can take some pride in the accomplishments of your student. If you're Sergey Brin's mom, you can be proud of how successful the son you raised has become. But that pride has nothing to do with being "British" "American" or "Russian". It has to do with your personal contribution to Google's success.
At the end of the day, either you've had a measurable contribution to something of value, and you can be proud of that, or you didn't, and you don't get to be proud just because people who have a similar passport to yours have.
You insist on using the word "pride", which Rayiner didn't. If you'd like, I'll stipulate that ordinary Americans shouldn't feel "proud" of Google, so that we can move back to the actual discussion of whether Americans should "take a little credit for" Google.
The discussion was started by Tepix which referred to pride. And no, merely being American does not give you credit for Google. For most people, it's very hard to know if they've made the environment better or worse for Google.
