dumb metric of the day US Patents per capita as a proxy for progress:

In raw numbers, Israel produces 20 times as many patentable ideas as the Arab countries. Corrected for population*******, Israelis overall produce patentable new ideas 587.65 times more per person than Arabs overall. Israeli companies in Israel produce patentable ideas 1114.96 times more per person than Arab companies in Arab countries. Why is that? I don't buy into race-based nonsense about intelligence, so I am left to believe that it must be political and/or cultural. Clearly, repressive societies throughout history have been outpaced economically and scientifically by free societies. I think that is key to the difference.

While I'm inclined to agree that repressive societies have lagged economically, the Soviet Union produced lots of good science, and China continues to. Now, I'm certainly willing to believe that Arab countries lag Israel technologically. But I'm not convinced that US patents fairly capture this. For starters, there's nothing intrinsically worthwhile about a patentable idea. People have patented the act of swinging side-to-side, using a laser pointer to play with your cat, a way to comb over your bald spot, and hyperlinks, none of which they actually invented. What's more, even if there were the same number of inventions in Israel as in Arab countries, it's not implausible that Israel -- having much closer ties with our country -- would simply patent more of them in the US. It's certainly conceivable that the USPTO is less likely to grant patents to applicants from Arab countries. And it's very possible that Arab culture may just care less about patenting ideas -- this WIPO page reports that some Muslims "have highlighted the claimed illegality of the very concept of intellectual property from the point of view of the Islamic Sharia." I don't know the answers to all these questions. But then I'm not the one trying to attach some higher meaning to patent counts. Godless strongly disagrees: Joel, Joel, Joel...methinks your animosity towards copyright law has waylaid your better judgement. I grant that Israel has closer ties with the US, and that the idea of intellectual property may be unpopular among some Arabs, and that many (most?) patents issued are for stupid things. All of these things are factors that one might have to take into account if the situation was a close call. But it is not a close call. Even the most uncharitable estimate of "real patent ratio" (defined as the ratio of justifiably patented ideas to all patents) will indicate that Israel has by far the lead in real patents. I've bolded the most impressive part of your post:

In raw numbers, Israel produces 20 times as many patentable ideas as the Arab countries. Corrected for population, Israelis overall produce patentable new ideas 587.65 times more per person than Arabs overall. Israeli companies in Israel produce patentable ideas 1114.96 times more per person than Arab companies in Arab countries.

Those ratios are unbelievable. Say what you will about the unfairness of patents and/or the lack of a higher meaning in patent counts. I will still bet $100 to $1 that a plot of "number of US patents" vs. IQ for a cross section of the population will produce a very strong positive correlation. In other words - the massive disparity in patent counts is a (noisy) predictor of the underlying population's IQ. One may claim that patent counts are a function of environment (e.g. government) rather than population IQ, but this theory would predict a narrowing of the patent-count-per-capita differential in a comparison of (say) US Jews and US Arabs. I don't know if such statistics are available, but I doubt they would support the "wholly environment" theory. Digression: Note, however, that this is not a wholesale indictment of Arab IQ. It's possible (likely?) that their mean is close to that of European whites once in first world societies as population genetic studies indicate that they're quite close to Europeans. Others have reason to disagree on this count. I for one would be interested in an account of the technical achievements of expatriate Arabs. (Aside - Iranians have indeed made their mark in science, but they are not Arabs and so do not count here.) Of course, in the end this sort of thing will be truly resolved once we have the hapmap and a better understanding of which genes control intelligence. At that point we will be able to tell retrospectively whether it was Islam or an IQ deficit that was slowing the Arab world's development. Note that there are very few populations who can compete with the Jews in science. The Arab-Jew patent disparity is just one of many consequences of this fact, and I wouldn't be surprised if (say) US Jews had a similar advantage in patent counts over US non-Jewish whites. In other words, there is a meaning to the disparity. Joel again But a large part of the reason why it's not a close call is that the Arabs simply aren't patenting things in the US. No Yemenites got US Patents last year. Does that mean Yemenites are dumb? Or does it mean they're not inventive? Or does it mean they're not interested in US patents? Maybe some combination of the three. But the piece I linked to never bothers to consider the subtleties, and that's really my gripe.