> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn

> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe, etc. Interesting comparison, but I offer a different interpretation. First of all, unfair to compare CH (Switzerland) with IT (Italy), instead of IT to FR (France), DE (Germany), ES (Spain), UK (United Kingdom), countries of rather similar population size, economy, land mass, etc. If you look at the list of countries by Nobel laureates per capita [0], you find the following: CH: 4th; 27 laureates; 31.6 per 10M people. UK: 10th; 133 laureates; 19.4 per 10M people. DE: 14th; 109 laureates; 13.2 per 10M people. FR: 17th; 70 laureates; 10.6 per 10M people. IT: 33rd; 20 laureates; 3.3 per 10M people. ES: 43rd; 8 laureates; 1.72 per 10M people. In fact, CH is in the same ballpark as Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Smaller countries, richer countries, countries with a better education system overall. In addition to that, of the 20 laureates in science in CH, 4 (20%) were born in other countries [1]. This is not (as it might certainly appear) to be pedantic, but rather to show that interpretation of data can give us a different story, based on what we are looking for. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country#Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...