The head of CMU's Robotics Institute made the transition to Dean of the CMU Qatar campus during my time there.

It was interesting to hear about the efforts the emirate was making towards becoming a western country. They have $8M/citizen in natural gas. To put it bluntly: that's fucking insane.

They are paying major US universities, the "best in field", to setup colleges in their areas. Georgetown on political science, Texas A&M for engineering, CMU for business & computer science, etc.

http://www.qf.edu.qa

What an excellent use of the ridiculous amount of wealth.

For Saudi Arabia, my intuition is they will never be a real industrial power while half the population lives as second-class citizens (not counting the migrant laborers who could only be considered, err..., third class citizens). It still blows my mind that women can't drive.

I still don't know if this will work for them. What matters most is the incentive structure for the students; and I don't think anyone can just engineer it correctly.

I'd prefer they build universities over palaces or 7 star hotels.

-- "What an excellent use of the ridiculous amount of wealth."

True. But keep in mind that real talent in any given society is limited. One thing that has made USA such a great technological powerhouse, is the ability to attract talent from all the corners of the world.

I just don't see Saudi Arabia being able to atract talent at that rate, unless they evolve from their medieval thinking.

Money talks.

The intangible anti-benefits of living in a dark-ages theocracy are probably worth a lot of negative money, especially to creative-thinker types.

Witness, on the other end of the scale, how much people are willing to pay for a crappy loft in SF (or, even more so, Manhattan!).

You're talking about young 20-somethings. But consider older people with children. These Gulf countries are (and have always been, but moreso now) willing to pay a lot of money (tax free) along with a boatload of benefits to experienced westerners who would work with them. It's hard to turn that down when you have children who one day will go to private American universities, etc.

A bit of trivia: A good friend of mine designed one of those new cities, and my cofounder is over in Riyadh at the moment coding. (He mentioned how boring it is there)

Whether or not they make it as an industrial power, at least the Saudis are investing for the future instead of squandering their petrodollars like some other resource rich countries, eg. Chavez's rampant spending in Venezuela.