The American West is rising, Harvard is falling:
Nobel laureates nations and research institutions
were measured between 1947-2006 in 20 year segments. The minimum
threshold for inclusion was 3 Nobel prizes. Credit was allocated to
each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time of
award. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 institutions which won three-plus
Nobel prizes in 20 years, the UK has 4, France has 2 and Sweden and
USSR 1 each. Four US institutions won 3 or more prizes in all 20 year
segments: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech. The most successful
institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by
Stanford (9), Columbia and Chicago (7). But the Western United States
has recently become the world dominant region for revolutionary
science, generating a new generation of elite public universities:
University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Washington at Seattle;
and the University of California institutions of Santa Barbara, Irvine,
UCSF, and UCLA; also the Fred Hutchinson CRC in Seattle. Since 1986 the
USA has 16 institutions which have won 3 plus prizes, but elsewhere in
the world only the College de France has achieved this. In UK’s
Cambridge University, Cambridge MRC unit, Oxford and Imperial College
have declined from 17 prizes in 1967-86 to only 3 since then. Harvard
has also declined as a revolutionary science university from being the
top Nobel-prize-winning institution for 40 years, to currently joint
sixth position. Although Nobel science prizes are sporadically won
by numerous nations and institutions, it seems that long term national
strength in revolutionary science is mainly a result of sustaining and
newly-generating multi-Nobel-winning research centres. At present these
elite institutions are found almost exclusively in the USA. The USA is
apparently the only nation with a scientific research system that
nurtures revolutionary science on a large scale.
That is from a forthcoming paper by Bruce Charlton, here is the full link.
“The USA is apparently the only nation…large scale”. What a biased statement! The best example for narrow mindedness.We people in the other side of the globe knows the politics behind awarding Nobel prizes.Even brightminds like Prof.Robinson and Kaldor were not given Nobel prize because of ideological prejudices.John Maynard Keynes would not have been given Nobel prize had he been alive now.
To Dan Cole – I am the author of the Nobel Prize study. Thanks for your remarks.
The ‘warmer climes’ argument may have some truth, but does not explain the big growth of new three-Nobel-institutions in the Western States over the last 20 years specifically.
Actually, I didn’t make any statement that West Coast institutions have ‘more laureates’ than East Coast (after all MIT, Columbia and Princeton are superstar places – and Harvard, still) just that the West was where the growth was over the past two decades.
Also, I wonder would Boulder, Colorado (4 prizes) and Seattle (6 prizes in two institutions) count as ‘warm climates’?
I entirely agree that it would be better to know where the laureates were situated when they did their prize-winning work (I say this in the paper) – but, having initially tried to establish this information for myself, I concluded that it would take many hundreds of hours of investigation: so I’m leaving this job to someone else!
What’s the ususual lag time for Nobels in the hard sciences? I’m interested in this because, in the wake of the Larry Summers brouhaha, I’ve been tracking the sex ratio of Nobel Laureates. Strikingly, when looking at physics, chemistry, and medicine combined, women made up a slightly higher percentage of the winners _before_ 1965 than after. This implies a remarkable failure of the feminist era to produce great female scientists. On the other hand, if the Nobel lag is extremely long, such as four decades, we may not have had a fair test yet.
By the way, there has never been an Economics laureate. That the most prominent female economist in America is likely Deirdre McCloskey, who used to be Donald McCloskey, may not be a coincidence.
Economics is a “science” comparable to Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine?
This is not true at all. Not unless you have an overly inclusive definition of science. In that case, where are the Noble Prizes for sociology, psychology, anthropology and the rest of the social “sciences”?
Economics should be stricken off this list of sciences. There are real discoveries in physics and chemistry and only pseudo discoveries in economics. I am sorry, but the Coase Theorem is not a scientific discovery.
It would be interesting to see how the author’s analysis comes out if he were to exclude economics. Until he does so, his research should not be taken seriously. The author excludes the Nobel prize in literature, presumably because literature is not a science. For similar reasons, economics should have been excluded.
Not only that, but outrageously, the author excludes consideration of such prizes as the Turing Award, which is often called the “Nobel Prize for Computer Science” due to the prestige and the magnitude of discovery that is required to receive it.
Surely, major advances in computer science are a much more important indicator (by orders of magnitude) of “revolutionary science” than economics. Very few technological changes have been enabled by advances in economics. In contrast, science itself has been revolutionized due to advances in computer science. The same cannot be said of economics.
There is something interesting about the patterns that the author has uncovered. But taken as a whole, this research is not worth much in evaluating what universities are most successfully supporting “revolutionary science.”
Does anyone care to comment about how many of these institutions are public universities as compared to private universities. If the political philosophy of the libertarian approach is to be believed these “public” universities are a complete waste of resources.
Ragerz – Just scroll further down the link provided by TC and you will find an additional analysis including as well as Nobels the Turing award – and also the Lasker award (clinical medicine) and Fields medal (mathematics).
Spencer – I agree that the public/ private university question is important, although probably not at the level of influencing fundamental political philosophies. The very most successful Nobel-prizewinning institutions are all private, but Berkeley has been high for 60 years, and the last 20 years have seen the rise of some other University of California institutions plus Boulder Colorado and U of Washington, Seattle.
So public universities _can_ do revolutionary science on a big scale when administered like these ones (it is worth noting that U Cal are much more autonomous than any UK public universities).
My guess is that the US publics are raised by the presence of competition from the privates, and that the system is – in that sense – driven by the privates. For example, faculty salaries at Berkeley are explicitly set by comparison with the ‘market’ established by rival privates.
Ragerz, I suspect you would find that research-wise, funding comes from a similar mix of public and private sources to profs at public universities and private universities. You’ll also find that private funding is very important for a school in fast growth mode, as UC Irvine has been for 20 years. Additionally, you’ll find that lots of construction is funded by bonds which are repaid by student fees.
Also, pitting economics against computer science is silly. This paper was just using a convenient metric to look at a large question. If you dislike the metric, come up with your own and publish the results. Economists and computer scientists should definitely collaborate more. For example, graph theory (networks of vertices and edges) could/should replace calculus as the default mathematical foundation for economics. It would give the theoretical computer science types lots of new ground to be theoretical with. It would more appropriately model economies as collections of individual actions rather than as aggregate curves.
Ragerz – we agree.
I say, in my first editorial: “I therefore suggest that the maximum of three laureates per year in the categories of physics, chemistry and economics should always be awarded, even when these prizes are for diverse and un-related achievements; that the number of laureates in the ‘biology’ category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine per year; and two new Prize categories should be introduced to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science. Together, these measures would increase the science laureates from a maximum of 12 to a minimum of 24, and increase their coverage.
This implicitly requires three laureates per year for the new prizes in mathematics and computing science, to make up the miniumum 24 per year.
But, as I discuss in the third editorial and confirming the comment of Brad Hutchings – these metrics should be considered rather like macroeconomic variables. They are top down measures and their validity (if any) depends on how they perform in practice, predictively over time – and not on their being an unbiased sample of revolutionary science activity.
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