It's inherent in human nature, the perception that things could be better and the desire to improve them.
> Keep in mind, the US wasn't always on top,
You're right, but it's the Brits that preceded us as the major world power. We inherited their legal system and commercial focus, it was a big reason why we were able to take the lead.
The other is our scale. The reason we talk about China being a rival and not Japan is that massive populations drive far far more progress, and as advanced as Japan is in many things, they simply don't have the scale needed.
The colonial economics that made Great Britain great were an outgrowth of the old agrarian empires, which subjugated local populations in order to derive a competitive advantage from them.
Now that subjugation is becoming less and less politically acceptable over time, if countries want to be powerful, they need to form large polities themselves. Only the US and China have massive, similarly-oriented populations that can work together long enough to create national wealth.
Indeed it is, but the most innovative product doesn't always win in the market place. The never ending desire for the newest thing may have cost constraints, maybe even ones that we haven't historically encountered before.
> We inherited their legal system and commercial focus, it was a big reason why we were able to take the lead.
Is there any reason to believe this is a pre-requisite of success though?
> The other is our scale.
China knows a thing or two about that.
I don't happen to believe there is only one path to success/dominance as it is a combination of many factors, not to mention the fact that luck/coincidence/timing is potentially far more important than people realize. Going on recorded human history, we're also dealing with relatively small sample sizes when it comes to making confident predictions of how things as complex as human cultures and global economics will pan out.
Well, if you go over my original comment again, I was more referring to process innovations and not feature innovations. Things like reducing material costs, logistics improvements, sustainability improvements. These are the sorts of things that you can't really say no to and that you're always going to be looking for more of.
> Is there any reason to believe this is a pre-requisite of success though?
China is an outlier in many, many ways. But when you look at Europe where much of the industrial and commercial success was historically, you'll see that the particular sorts of social innovations form the foundation on which market economies thrive.
We saw how a command economy played out when a nation wanted to be a superpower before. The USSR simply collapsed under its own weight. The incentive to produce and innovate can't come from one place. Great Britain's market focus and political innovations allowed a society to rise up that created it's own incentives.
China can throw mountains of resources to solve one problem. But they're limited to only solving one problem at a time. Because the incentives for success can only come from the state.
What often gets lost in the equation, because it's difficult to put a number to, is robustness. The Chinese economy can be looked at as a gaggle of one trick ponies. For example, you can go to a Chinese factory, hand them a blueprint, and get very good results, on maybe the third run, after you iron out all the kinks.
American industry iterates on proven designs that have been iterated on continuously since the Industrial Revolution. Our creative professionals can get very specialized. I met a young lady engineer once who could talk your ear off about toilets. She was in charge of a very niche aspect of toilet design and her one specialty likely numbered in the hundreds.
Now I'm not saying that Chinese engineers can't produce quality products. What I'm saying is that as quality as these products are, they're still stone age in many, many, many respects compared to American designs. Techies can't really see or understand this because all of this collected industrial knowledge isn't open source and is passed through institutions.
They can produce a toilet that works. We can produce a toilet design that lasts 4 times longer, uses 30% less water, meets recyclability guidelines for porcelain, does not compromise strength yet is 40% lighter, and can be packed 30 per pallet rather than 10. Sure it gets manufactured in China, and they might rip off one of our designs, but they're going to be perennially playing catch-up. Can they make that toilet in 10 different fashions to match both upscale and low-end bathrooms? Rinse and repeat for every single other consumer and industrial product that modern society uses.
We've been dominant in so many areas for so long that for China to even get on our level would mean to first create a middle class that's the same size as ours, so they can start iterating on a similar level as we have been doing for over a hundred years. That's no mean feat. Just because they're moving similar quantities of products around as we are doesn't mean that that wealth is getting shared with the public enough to create a professional class.
And until they can create a professional class of their own, they will always be playing second fiddle to our professional class.