Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is.

Australia has none of that immense legacy, due to the age of their nation. And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. The impressive history of France doesn't matter very much in the scope of most practical matters related to the present.

> Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is.

Slightly off-topic, but for some reason I've run into a seemingly disproportionate (in terms of world population) number of good computer scientists who were born in Greece.

A Greek professor told me that when he started his PhD (in the US) his Greek advisor told him as a Greek in America his two options were to become a control theorist or open a diner.

> And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita.

I agree with your main point, caveat that I don't know anything about the current state of French science because I don't know any French.

With this aside though, Australia has an order of magnitude more land than France, and half as many people, so individual Australians should have an absurd amount of raw resource available to them. In a sense, Australia should have a GDP per capita 20x France's purely on raw resources.

Comparing material wealth and academic success isn't really fair. Academics depends on small communities, and is a highly cultural endeavor. Wealth depends on resources and stability, which is less so.

Not really, because raw land is valuable for three things: agriculture, real estate, and natural resource extraction, and the first two are virtually worthless in deserts which is most of Australia’s land.

Excuse me, but Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia was Italian.