Your knowledge of statistics and science is worse than Alpha's. Whether country A is richer or poorer than country B is not a theoretical question; it's an empirical one. A theoretical question would be "what causes a country to become richer?" And you would answer that question not by simply comparing the traits of rich countries to the traits of poor ones, but by looking at the effects of every individual trait, while controlling for all the other ones. Seriously, you have absolutely no idea about this area, and I'm not using hyperbole here.