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Originally Posted by bladeofdarkness
all of it very very true.
for PEOPLE.
but the topic was about countries.
very large groups of people working together.
its true that pushing individuals too hard can have a damaging result on them, but we're not talking about individuals here.
Countries in competition allocate more resources to things that they wouldn't otherwise allocate them to.
think of how much the space race was effected by the US and USSR's dick waving contest.
and how much it faltered since the end of the cold war (they just shut down the shuttle program, and there's no replacement in sight).
once the race was over, why bother.
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It's true for people. But people are what make countries. The experience of one passes on to the other, and so on. What one person does will affect the other, spreading through the population of people that they work with, which in turn will affect all other populations it has connections with. And the aspect of pushing for evolution isn't limited to the inidividual, it can easily be applied to countries as well.
For example, looking at the race of competition in the US, one can understand how it affected the labor market, and there's various reasons why a lot of business activities were outsourced from the US to other countries were finding the same or similar quality labor is easier due to pricing differences. The same can be said for other developed countries, namely in Europe.
Much of modern competition and innovation doesn't revolve around innovation in the classical sense anymore, but around marketing, how well you can advertise yourself or what you make or do. Competition in organizations, companies, governments, is more about making sales than real and genuine innovation. Competition in the larger scale is more about getting more people under your wing by encouraging them to buy your goods.
Evolution, by definition, is the growth of a certain body, be it individual or a group of individuals, as a result of experience gained from survival. If you take a really close look at the sort of breakthroughs that have occurred since the cold war, much of the competition and innovation has encouraged the production of goods that do not neccessarily have a huge effect on people's evolutions. Machines being created to ease people's lives. As a collective body, a country, it makes people more reliant on these machines or computers and less able to work on their own. In the long run, it inhibits people's ability to grow and as a result, evolve, and this in turn affects the country's ability to evolve.