For outcompeting, no.
It's hard to do country comparisons because of all the confounders. But for particular industries, it's easy to find examples.
The Japanese automobile industry clearly outcompeted the US one during the late 80s and the 90s, for example. Or look at where all the semiconductors are produced.
This is not to say that being a copycat is better than being an innovator -- just that the first-mover advantage sometimes is significant and sometimes is not.
On what basis do you consider the Japanese automobile industry not engaging in research and innovation?
For the data I can find Japan had in 1984 62k granted patents while the US had 67k Given that the US had roughly twice the population, Japan might have outcompeted the US because of more innovation.
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.