> Just giving money will not work, see Saudi Arabia. They have all the money they can dream of and did not evolve.

There are so many reasons why that's not relevant to the conversation that it's hard to know where to start. 1) You are conflating value systems with poverty. 2) You are cherry picking one particularly bad example and using it as evidence that it could NEVER work. 3) "All the money they can dream of" does not apply to all Saudi Arabians, it applies to those that have a lot of money.

The Saudi's have a recently reformed education system, complete with a freshly built full-fledged research university: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST.)

KAUST has a more Western model of education, instruction in English, American and European faculty, partnerships with multiple Ivy League institutions. The current President of KAUST is Jean-Lou Chameau, who was previously the president of Caltech.

Perhaps most significantly, the university is granted greater freedom of speech and thought than probably anywhere else in Saudi Arabia. Saudi royalists politically protect the University, while the campus's isolated location prevents random acts of "law enforcement" by the religious police.

KAUST has an endowment of $20 Billion USD, which puts it in the same league monetarily with H/Y/P and is about twice the endowment of Oxbridge.

So the Saudis are investing in the right things in advanced education at least: alternative energy, desalinization technology, chemical engineering...

They're also building a series of new model commercial cities along the coast where they will attempt the same thing on a city-state scale. The religious rules will be less strictly enforced in these model cities, but far more importantly (for commerce), they will have independent judiciaries (still based on sharia fiqh law), but with written standardized laws of contract (uncertain contracts have put a strain on the Saudi economy.) They're also considering relaxing the onerous permitting regulations required to start a business.

It seems like the Saudis' want to have their cake, and eat it too. On the one hand, they want the benefits of Western higher education and economic systems. But on the other, they want to maintain a fundamentalist religious monarchy.

I cannot really see that being successful. The academic freedom needed to conduct meaningful research is diametrically opposed to the restrictions on thought and expression in a repressive theocracy.

What do you mean didn't evolve?

My understanding is a lot of stuff is free in Saudi Arabia. Oil money is used to fund education and cash is given to citizens.

Not sure I understand your point.

Yes, education is important. But what also matters is a working government. Strong unions and high taxes are a consequence (you have them once you can afford them), not a tool to achieve wealth.

I hear Hugo Chavez' daughter has billions.

I'm not sure the OP program is meant to lead to any kind of 'evolution'. It's meant to lead to fewer poor people.