It certainly depends on what you optimize for. For example, about 1/3 of the 320 American Nobel Prizes in science have gone to immigrants.

Currently, US universities license around 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to startups and companies. They spin out over 1,100 science-based startups yearly, creating countless products and tens of thousands of jobs.

This university/government partnership became the model other countries try to copy post WWII, though the current administration has walked away from it.

The genius of the US system was indirect cost reimbursement. The government not only paid researchers' salaries but also funded their facilities and administration costs. This was the secret sauce that built world-class university labs that attracted scientists globally, causing other countries to worry about "brain drain" to the decentralized, collaborative US ecosystem combining massive government funding for university research with private industry scaling the solutions.

Meanwhile, Britain tried a centralized approach with government labs, achieving breakthroughs but lacking the scale, integration and capital to compete in the post-war world.