I lived in China, and they'll tell you why they couldn''t field a winning Olympic team in any sort of real sport for decades. (It's a bit different now, because they figured out the "study" stuff is kinda unrewarding as the country developed).
They would say, the West (more so in the past) allows more freedom for children to discover their aptitudes or interests and develop on those, you get much better outcomes across the whole spectrum: art, music, academic, athletic, social, ect... And that had historically been a huge win for us.
Asian culture, forces kids into achieving academic outcomes, and sure, that sounds good on paper, but they don't discover or cultivate their own interests. This not only creates unfilled needs in society, but it even produces mediocrity in the academic arena. Because when society selects "the best" academically, it's just jam packed with dismal uninterested people who grinded (or cheated), all on the same path, for the same outcome, and the signals that identify the true raw aptitude/talent/passion gets destroyed.
I'd argue brining the Asian influence in over the last 40 years, has fucked shit up, because again, Western society's classifiers can't find the genuinely interested academic kids among the seas of all these "results at all costs" grinders who've jammed up the paths to colleges and the job market... Which has also produced this hated mediocre elite that runs shit like a bunch of retards.
Trying to be more "Asian" legit, has been a cultural setback.... Let the fuggin' kids who are interested in studying, study. Let the kids who aren't, find out what they're good at, and do that shit to the best of their ability... It's like a full spectrum win.
But, don't let these fuckers tell you our culture is backwards. The results speak for themselves.
With harshest competition and extreme margins of excellence, there are always several outcomes:
Nothing is perfect.
The current Western academic institutions, of which I've been part of, taught in, graduated from and seen thousands of post-grads in, mostly caters to the medium crowd, has significantly lowered standards of excellence and produces huge amounts of useless drivel, devoid of any practical utility - EVEN in STEM fields.
That's why I left it and will never go back. I'd rather sweep floors in a warehouse, code on my own or chop food and feed animals. More honest, less bullshit.
I've seen many of the best (not me, better than me by far) make the same decisions and leave academia for good in the West due to this bullshittery.
So, no - I don't see the West excelling or winning. Maybe the top 1% of STEM who have been mind-protected at home strong enough not to fall into mediocrity. The rest? Not so sure.
All in all, the world is going down the drain : education, innovations, patents, true risk taking, cross-disciplinary true teamwork, profound basic science, breakthrough applied science...
It's just more , faster, quicker, cheaper derivate works that give fast ROI that can be pump-dump-utilized for a few quarters for max profit, and then onto next grift.
The true long term planning is too costly, too risky, required too much long term concentration and leadership riski taking that doesn't really exist anymore.
Yeah, it's a bleak picture. What can I tell you? Wish it weren't so: tried to change it in my own way and didn't succeed and saw much braver and capable people than me fail harder.
People are herd animals and don't want to rise above the herd, but want to follow a singular leader.
It's just that the leaders in most fields these days are life-time actors, well-connected ZOG players, Deep State puppets or fuck-you-I'm-innit-for-meself psychos.
Yeah dude. I pretty much quiet quit a long time ago in Engineering fields. There's nothing aspirational. I'll just take my paycheck.
What you said is the premise of "Excellent Sheep" which was an essay/book that really framed what was going on about 10ish years ago... Competition began producing skilled "hoop-jumpers", and began to fail at cultivating talent... And now these high intensity midwits are running the world.
We benefited more from our academic system when it was more voluntary and less of a social requirement to move up in our fake-and-gay neo feudal system.