
The hierarchy of countries winning Nobels in the sciences is shifting - sajid
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/05/10/the-hierarchy-of-countries-winning-nobels-in-the-sciences-is-shifting
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LeanderK
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".

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dfgert
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.

~~~
LeanderK
> There isn't any real research happening outside of flagship institutions

Does that really imply research only happens at stanford, MIT and Harvard? Or
what are "flagship" institutions?

What I wanted to say is that you can skew you distribution of researchers
towards the absolute top by giving the few an enviroment the competitors can't
match. I would think that this will probably be revealed if you compare for
example nobel-prizes to overall citations a country produced. But that's
harder to track.

~~~
coldtea
> _Does that really imply research only happens at stanford, MIT and Harvard?_

The research that matters, yes. There and in a few others all around the
world.

Papers, on the other hand, are written everywhere by the thousands...

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ci5er
> The research that matters, yes. There and in a few others all around the
> world.

Do you have any basis for this claim?

I've found that (for example) the top research in cosmology and the top in
material design and the top in semiconductor physics (as it moves into
exploring exotics) are not only different universities (around the world), but
that none of them are the three that are mentioned up-thread.

Now, I can sling an anecdote with the best of them, but I am surprised at your
claim, so I'm hoping you have better data than I?

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coldtea
> _but that none of them are the three that are mentioned up-thread._

Not sure if cosmology is some exception (I guess one could find specialist
universities in all kinds of subjects), but overall those three as exactly
ranked as the top three, ranked by papers, quality, citations, patents, etc,
here, across all kinds of fields:

"To compile the 2017 ranking of the world’s most innovative universities,
Clarivate Analytics (formerly the Intellectual Property & Science business of
Thomson Reuters) began by identifying more than 600 global organizations –
including educational institutions, nonprofit charities and government-funded
labs – that publish the most academic research. Then they evaluated each
candidate on 10 different metrics, focusing on academic papers (which indicate
basic research) and patent filings (which point to an institution’s ability to
apply research and commercialize its discoveries), and ranked them based on
their performance."

1 Stanford University

2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

3 Harvard University

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amers-reuters-ranking-
inn...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amers-reuters-ranking-innovative-
univ/reuters-top-100-the-worlds-most-innovative-
universities-2017-idUSKCN1C209R)

~~~
LeanderK
this is exactly what I wanted to criticise by my comment. I don't think these
rankings are that important because they don't capture what the (original)
article wanted to measure. There's only one stanford, which might be better
than every other university out there. But there are a lot, often way smaller,
universities out there that produce fantastic research. You have to add them
together.

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jopsen
> 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
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

~~~
jgmjgm
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
meh my prior on british nationals writing about american decline is not very
high...even if he did work for larry summers

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j7ake
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/jour...](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)

Their statement "Accounting for population, it is the British who have
accumulated the most Nobel prizes" is wrong.

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arcanus
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.

~~~
blt
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.

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nabla9
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.

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qubax
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.

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zeroname
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.

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known
[https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/l9to/](https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/l9to/)

