Globalization is once again better than many people realize:

We study the role of foreign ideas in U.S. innovation by constructing a directed “genealogy” of technologies from the full text of 13 million patents filed between 1887 and 2024. By tracing which earlier technologies appear in the founding patents of new ones, we recover a large-scale input–output network of technological recombination that identifies the foreign technologies that serve as inputs into innovation in the United States. We report four main findings. First, foreign ideas are pervasive: 54% of U.S. technologies build on at least one foreign input, and the most fertile U.S. technologies rely on foreign inputs most heavily. Second, foreign ideas have large causal effects on U.S. innovation. Using the historical settlement of migrants as a source of exogenous variation in local ancestry, we show that U.S.…