Man, Econ really is the miserable science. "I started with a politically charged theory passed down from The Elders and, after 6 years of being paid to search for evidence of that theory, guess what, I found some".

For starters, using patents as a proxy for innovation is dubious at best. Patents are a terrible proxy for innovation. My own experience has been the inverse: organizations/individuals that patenting shit lots of shit are consistently the least inventive. Not sure if this was true in the early 20th century, but it certainly is today.