A Princeton study has found that the fewer people self-identify as religious a country has, the more patents per capita it registers.
"We use international data to analyse the relationship between religiosity and innovativeness, both in raw form and controlling for the standard determinants of technological innovation used in the empirical literature," the authors wrote.
The researchers measured religiosity via responses to the World Values survey questions "Independently of whether you go to church or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person, a convinced atheist or you don't know" and "Do you believe in God - yes, no, don't know."
They then compared this to how many patents per capita the countries surveyed produced.
Right off the bat they found that there was a strong negative correlation, and after adjusting for education and GDP - that negative correlation remained.
They then did a similar test within the US regarding the individual states, and got the same result.
One should be cautious about deriving too much from these figures however, as economic statistics can lead to weird and less than meaningful results.
A previous study had, after all, found that a country's GDP is inversely correlated to its average penis size.
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