7 ms·

The hierarchy of countries winning Nobels in the sciences is shifting

47 points by sajid 8y ago

arcanus 8y ago
I'm not sure I find those statistics compelling. I'd like to see the numerical method used to compute the first derivative. Was it just a finite difference? The Nobel prizes are lumpy and so they smoothed the function as well. I'd be much more interested in a comparison between the European union and the USA, which are similar in GDP and population. Would be very interesting to see the aggregate and slope of China and India as well. Are they gaining? My perception has been that they are not, but the data is so lumpy, and the nobel such a lagging indicator, that I'm not sure it has meaning.
- fgheorghe 8y ago
  I am surprised British “research” is seen as valuable anywhere else but Britain.
  - pdpi 8y ago
    Definitely. Turing, Rayleigh, Wiles, Dirac, Thomson, Rutherford, Fleming, Crick... who cares about any of their work? They’re all just hacks.
    - teddyh 8y ago
      How much of the work which made those people famous was actually made in the UK? If a UK citizen is working and/or living abroad, can the work they do really be “credited”, so to speak, to the UK? Conversely, should not UK get the credit, if non-UK citizens have immigrated to the UK and do their work at UK institutions?
      - throwaway080383 8y ago
        Hawking spent his entire professional life in the UK. Wiles bounced around between Princeton, Paris, and Oxford, but he was educated up through his PhD in the UK. From my perspective as an American in number theory, it seems there is no shortage of strong people coming from UK, Australia, Germany, France, India, and China, but there are many who come to the US and stay here. Anecdotally, it seems rare for a very strong person in the US to move elsewhere, unless it is back to their home country.
  - presscast 8y ago
    I'm surprised you think this. UCL is consistently top-notch in a number of fields. Example: did you know their software powers >90% of fMRI studies in cognitive neuroscience? The Wellcome Trust is a major part of why this happens, and that's very much a part of British research.
  - dang 8y ago
    Nationalistic trolling will get you banned here. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- blt 8y ago
  I had the same reaction. It looks like they fit a spline to the data, and then took the analytical derivative of the spline. But there are other ways to do it like locally weighted regression. In general estimating derivatives from real world data is noisy, ill conditioned, should be treated carefully.
williesleg 8y ago
Didn't Obama win a Nobel for doing nothing? It's all way overrated.
nabla9 8y ago
From the numbers it looks like Nobel per capita in western countries should be even out over long term, but things like immigration and wars, and economics produces temporary (even century long) disruptions.
LeanderK 8y ago
I think nobels are overrated as an indicator of scientific research, because they don't capture most of the research but only the "super-star" researchers. This is great for figuring out which flagship institutions are attracting the best of the best, but this is not what you want to measure if you think of "research output".
- dfgert 8y ago
  I disagree a bit with you. In today's world we have reached a state where next new research output requires access to advance tools and strong funding which is only available to researchers at flagship institutions. There isn't any real research happening outside of flagship institutions; other institutions may make big claims on research they are doing but they almost never deliver output. In some sense, distribution of nobel prizes per country can be attributed countries research outout.
  - wslh 8y ago
    This, there are experiments that cost millions of dollars just to build and they can fail and need many other costly experiments. Beyond this, it is true that some researchers can find theoretical research using only "pen and pencil... and computers". OñAnother example about the former case (in computer science) is where a researcher can quickly build a team of a hundred post doc students to help in specific topics.
    - peoplewrong 8y ago
      I don't think there are many (any) academic labs in CS with 100 post-docs. also post docs arent students. big engineering research efforts like that DO happen in industry though.
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        There's a big difference between how much it costs to do research in CS and how much it costs to do research elsewhere. It costs $10^9/year to run the LHC.
jopsen 8y ago
> Nobel-prize data suggest the productivity of American science has fallen Nope, it could also be that suddenly the rest of the world is starting to catch up. There is a fixed number of Nobel-prizes, it's not a measure of productivity -- unless you figure research is fixed sum game.
- mberning 8y ago
  This is exactly what’s happening. I despise these headlines that are couched with a mildly anti-American sentiment. You could easily re-write it to convey the fact that many parts of the world are experiencing great prosperity and development and thus scientific achievement. But no, let’s write as America is circling the drain. Edit: looks like the title was updated
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Well, a lot about America itself experiencing great prosperity and development was based on other parts of the world circling the drain (and thus sending immigrants there by the tons). Take out a lot of the motives for European scientists to go to the US in the mid/late 19th and early-mid 20th century for example, and how many scientific achievements would be left there?
  - jgmjgm 8y ago
    There really is a long-term productivity problem in the USA though. Edward Luce wrote a good book on the subject a couple of years back, "Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent". He's a journalist at the FT. That and his "The Retreat of Western Liberalism" are very well researched and readable. The book speaks to exactly these trends of decreasing productivity, loss of manufacturing and a decline in educational attainment of the US population as a whole. The book is not anti-American but a warning by someone who is concerned about the decline of America and the social and geo-political implications that implies.
    - peoplewrong 8y ago
      meh my prior on british nationals writing about american decline is not very high...even if he did work for larry summers
thwy12321 8y ago
More America bashing, this article is pure propaganda. Our science is the worst! But somehow all of the technological innovation is happening here.
qubax 8y ago
Of course. It's common sense. As the rest of the world gets more industrialized, wealthier and better educated, it's inevitable the awards will be less concentrated in one place. It's keep spreading out as time goes on. It's not just nobel prizes in science. It's billionaires list, chess rankings, supercomputers list, top polluters list, top colleges, everything. China by itself has more people than US and Europe combined. India by itself has more people than the US and Europe combined. ASEAN has more people than europe. If they are able to continue to develop and contribute, it's inevitable that their share of the prizes will increases sooner or later. What's tragic is that the opportunity costs for them being so underdeveloped. How many geniuses and entrepreneurs were wasted because of lack of development and opportunity? How much human progress have we left of the table as a result? It's sad to think about.
zeroname 8y ago
Nobel prices come in lumps, as Feynman would say. Missing out on a just one lump can skew that graph significantly. Going back in time, both the German and UK graphs have points where one could've come to the same conclusion, except they quickly recovered.
known 8y ago
https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/l9to/ https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/l9to/
j7ake 8y ago
Why does this graph show only 4 countries as if they are the top 4? Per capita, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Norway all have more Nobel prizes per capita than UK. https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/2012/nejm_2012.367.issue-16/nejmon1211064/production/images/img_xlarge/nejmon1211064_f1.jpeg https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour... Their statement "Accounting for population, it is the British who have accumulated the most Nobel prizes" is wrong.

47 points by sajid 8y ago

I'm not sure I find those statistics compelling. I'd like to see the numerical method used to compute the first derivative. Was it just a finite difference? The Nobel prizes are lumpy and so they smoothed the function as well. I'd be much more interested in a comparison between the European union and the USA, which are similar in GDP and population. Would be very interesting to see the aggregate and slope of China and India as well. Are they gaining? My perception has been that they are not, but the data is so lumpy, and the nobel such a lagging indicator, that I'm not sure it has meaning.

fgheorghe 8y ago
I am surprised British “research” is seen as valuable anywhere else but Britain.
- pdpi 8y ago
  Definitely. Turing, Rayleigh, Wiles, Dirac, Thomson, Rutherford, Fleming, Crick... who cares about any of their work? They’re all just hacks.
  - teddyh 8y ago
    How much of the work which made those people famous was actually made in the UK? If a UK citizen is working and/or living abroad, can the work they do really be “credited”, so to speak, to the UK? Conversely, should not UK get the credit, if non-UK citizens have immigrated to the UK and do their work at UK institutions?
    - throwaway080383 8y ago
      Hawking spent his entire professional life in the UK. Wiles bounced around between Princeton, Paris, and Oxford, but he was educated up through his PhD in the UK. From my perspective as an American in number theory, it seems there is no shortage of strong people coming from UK, Australia, Germany, France, India, and China, but there are many who come to the US and stay here. Anecdotally, it seems rare for a very strong person in the US to move elsewhere, unless it is back to their home country.
- presscast 8y ago
  I'm surprised you think this. UCL is consistently top-notch in a number of fields. Example: did you know their software powers >90% of fMRI studies in cognitive neuroscience? The Wellcome Trust is a major part of why this happens, and that's very much a part of British research.
- dang 8y ago
  Nationalistic trolling will get you banned here. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
blt 8y ago
I had the same reaction. It looks like they fit a spline to the data, and then took the analytical derivative of the spline. But there are other ways to do it like locally weighted regression. In general estimating derivatives from real world data is noisy, ill conditioned, should be treated carefully.

williesleg 8y ago

Didn't Obama win a Nobel for doing nothing? It's all way overrated.

nabla9 8y ago

From the numbers it looks like Nobel per capita in western countries should be even out over long term, but things like immigration and wars, and economics produces temporary (even century long) disruptions.

LeanderK 8y ago

I think nobels are overrated as an indicator of scientific research, because they don't capture most of the research but only the "super-star" researchers. This is great for figuring out which flagship institutions are attracting the best of the best, but this is not what you want to measure if you think of "research output".

dfgert 8y ago
I disagree a bit with you. In today's world we have reached a state where next new research output requires access to advance tools and strong funding which is only available to researchers at flagship institutions. There isn't any real research happening outside of flagship institutions; other institutions may make big claims on research they are doing but they almost never deliver output. In some sense, distribution of nobel prizes per country can be attributed countries research outout.
- wslh 8y ago
  This, there are experiments that cost millions of dollars just to build and they can fail and need many other costly experiments. Beyond this, it is true that some researchers can find theoretical research using only "pen and pencil... and computers". OñAnother example about the former case (in computer science) is where a researcher can quickly build a team of a hundred post doc students to help in specific topics.
  - peoplewrong 8y ago
    I don't think there are many (any) academic labs in CS with 100 post-docs. also post docs arent students. big engineering research efforts like that DO happen in industry though.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      There's a big difference between how much it costs to do research in CS and how much it costs to do research elsewhere. It costs $10^9/year to run the LHC.

jopsen 8y ago

> Nobel-prize data suggest the productivity of American science has fallen Nope, it could also be that suddenly the rest of the world is starting to catch up. There is a fixed number of Nobel-prizes, it's not a measure of productivity -- unless you figure research is fixed sum game.

mberning 8y ago
This is exactly what’s happening. I despise these headlines that are couched with a mildly anti-American sentiment. You could easily re-write it to convey the fact that many parts of the world are experiencing great prosperity and development and thus scientific achievement. But no, let’s write as America is circling the drain. Edit: looks like the title was updated
- coldtea 8y ago
  Well, a lot about America itself experiencing great prosperity and development was based on other parts of the world circling the drain (and thus sending immigrants there by the tons). Take out a lot of the motives for European scientists to go to the US in the mid/late 19th and early-mid 20th century for example, and how many scientific achievements would be left there?
- jgmjgm 8y ago
  There really is a long-term productivity problem in the USA though. Edward Luce wrote a good book on the subject a couple of years back, "Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent". He's a journalist at the FT. That and his "The Retreat of Western Liberalism" are very well researched and readable. The book speaks to exactly these trends of decreasing productivity, loss of manufacturing and a decline in educational attainment of the US population as a whole. The book is not anti-American but a warning by someone who is concerned about the decline of America and the social and geo-political implications that implies.
  - peoplewrong 8y ago
    meh my prior on british nationals writing about american decline is not very high...even if he did work for larry summers

thwy12321 8y ago

More America bashing, this article is pure propaganda. Our science is the worst! But somehow all of the technological innovation is happening here.

qubax 8y ago

Of course. It's common sense. As the rest of the world gets more industrialized, wealthier and better educated, it's inevitable the awards will be less concentrated in one place. It's keep spreading out as time goes on. It's not just nobel prizes in science. It's billionaires list, chess rankings, supercomputers list, top polluters list, top colleges, everything. China by itself has more people than US and Europe combined. India by itself has more people than the US and Europe combined. ASEAN has more people than europe. If they are able to continue to develop and contribute, it's inevitable that their share of the prizes will increases sooner or later. What's tragic is that the opportunity costs for them being so underdeveloped. How many geniuses and entrepreneurs were wasted because of lack of development and opportunity? How much human progress have we left of the table as a result? It's sad to think about.

zeroname 8y ago

Nobel prices come in lumps, as Feynman would say. Missing out on a just one lump can skew that graph significantly. Going back in time, both the German and UK graphs have points where one could've come to the same conclusion, except they quickly recovered.

known 8y ago

https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/l9to/ https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/l9to/

j7ake 8y ago

Why does this graph show only 4 countries as if they are the top 4? Per capita, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Norway all have more Nobel prizes per capita than UK. https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/2012/nejm_2012.367.issue-16/nejmon1211064/production/images/img_xlarge/nejmon1211064_f1.jpeg https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour... Their statement "Accounting for population, it is the British who have accumulated the most Nobel prizes" is wrong.