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Notes -
I guess the argument could hold up if the Mesopotamian agriculturalists relocated to a more favorable area and were able to use their accumulated skills to jump ahead quickly, like the American colonists. But this still runs into the problem that their skills are constrained by the environment.
Imo a more predictive version of SAT* would have to include a “G” for geography, encompassing things like natural resources, soil quality, likelihood of natural disasters (ie America and Singapore supposedly have lower human capital than their growth rates would indicate but both are blessed with really favorable geography).
But at that point you can’t really create a simple formula for a simple theory anymore, you’re back to saying “growth is a whole bunch of different factors”
For what it's worth, Arab immigrants from the Fertile Crescent do form a market-dominant minority across much of Latin America (including the president of El Salvador who has been getting a lot of attention recently) and Africa.
And as far as simple formulas go, I'd be surprised if IQ by itself didn't get you a lot closer to the mark than SAT, with the caveat that many, if not most, nations are too diverse to be analyzed as a single unit regardless of what parameters are being considered (e.g. Latin America has Whites, Mestizos, and Natives; India has its castes; every African country is a patchwork of tribes and ethnic groups).
In terms of how this potential, however it is determined, relates to a given country's economic performance, I often analogize it to genetically predicted height, where it's easier to make someone shorter than they would be otherwise through malnutrition, but quite hard to make them taller than their genes indicate. We can easily find pairs of countries where one has been held back from its true potential, usually but not exclusively by communism e.g. North and South Korea or Burma and Thailand. The key challenge in terms of immigration policy would be to identify nations underperforming relative to their potential and encourage migration from those places specifically.
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