If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "
That's a partial list. It also takes good universities, a culture that produces a willingness to take risks, a sufficient market for good products, and I suspect a litany of other things.
I think once you've got a society that genuinely innovates started, it can be hard to kill that off, but it can be and has been done. The problem is, as you mentioned, very few societies have ever been particularly innovative.
It's easy to use established technology to build a very prosperous first world society. For example: Australia, Canada, Sweden. But it's much harder for a society to genuinely drive humanity forwards and in the history of humanity it has only happened a few times. We forget that for a very long time, very little invention happened in human society anywhere.
Yes, of course.
This implies that there are good reasons for it. You can look at it in the exploit/explore framework and going full explore is rarely a good choice. Notably, betting on innovation produces a large variance of outcomes and you need to be sure you can survive that variance.