[roenxi]

The life expectancy at birth stats have to be reflective of the fall of the Soviet Union - to work out that males expected to live 50 years they have to be observed to die, which means the stats must be heavily influenced by events that happened in the last 50 years. It'd be a laggy indicator. While extremely interesting, I don't think there is a paradox there as much as hints that an empire collapsing because of economic incompetence might be bad for people in the imperial core.

And I've never been particularly impressed by comparisons of patents between countries either. I doubt the legal systems operate the same way and having a word that translates to "patent" doesn't imply to me that it actually means the same thing. Even if they do my impression is that patents are actually progress-retardant - places that make a habit of politely ignoring that part of IP law tend to do quite well (see: China and FOSS software are both interesting case studies).

Nonetheless this is an interesting area to focus on; Russia is an unimpressive country - it really should be in a similar league to China/the US/India and they just don't have the weight that those 3 names do.