I don't know if those examples show 'outcompeting'. The overall picture of various countries doesn't show late growers exceeding the absolute wealth of early growers (maybe one would predict this based on cultural/human-capital/institution theories?).
As far as Western industrialization went, the big players in roughly chronological order were the UK, Netherlands, France, USA, & Austria/Germany. It seems fair to call them the 'innovators', and you seem to have only East Asian countries in mind, so I'll look at just China/Taiwan/Korea (South, but not North)/Japan/Hong Kong (which I think is all of them) as 'imitators'.
Consider their wealth (GDP PPP per capita); in descending order it goes: United States (10), Hong Kong (10), Netherlands/Belgium (13/24), Austria/Germany (16/17), Taiwan (22), France (26), Japan (27), UK (28), South Korea (30), and 60 places way down the list is China (89).
How badly are they outcompeted? Well, South Korea & China beat none of them, Japan just barely edges out the UK (which we might attribute to socialist decay), Taiwan is past France & the UK but is pretty small, and Hong Kong is even more exceptional (tiny & UK-founded). In general, it seems to be better to be an 'innovator' than a (successful) 'imitator'.
If I drop Hong Kong as too tiny and exceptional, the permutations seem to be going in the direction of innovation being better too:
R> countries <- data.frame(PPP=c( 10, 10, 13, 24, 16, 17, 22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 89),
Innovator=c(TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE))
R> wilcox.test(PPP ~ Innovator, data=countries)
Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction
data: PPP by Innovator
W = 24.5, p-value = 0.2903
At least, if the East Asians are 'outcompeting', it doesn't look like it's clearly happened yet.
I find it a very sensible move to go for numbers here, esp. GDP/capita, but I'm not sure that captures the outcompeting/freeriding that was meant.
Yesterday I attended church service in Romania where I had visited my sister and the sermon was about the four things a (christian) community has to follow to persevere and grow.
I first considered just posting the quote from the Acts of the Apostles (reproduced below) in the Rationality Quotes Thread but I fear without explanation the inferential gap of the quote is too large.
The LessWrong Meetups, the EA community and other rationalist communities probably can learn from the experience of long established orders (I once asked for lessons from free masonry).
So I drew the following connections:
According to the the sermon and the below verse the four pillars of a christian community are:
Other analogies that I drew from the quote:
And what I just right now notice is that embedding the rules in the scripture is essentially self-reference. As the scripture is canon this structure perpetuates itself. Clearly a meme that ensures its reproduction.
Does this sound convincing and plausible or did I fell trap to some bias in (over)interpreting the sermon?
I hope this is upvoted for the lessons we might draw from this - despite the quote clearly being theistic in origin.