Which country has the best brains? | Hacker News Reader

Which country has the best brains?

bbc.co.uk

12 pointsmayutana16 comments

Measuring brains by number of Nobel prize winners is a bad idea. Modern science is heavily dependent on funding and scientists from developed countries have more opportunities here.

As an example take this year's winners in physics. One of them is British citizen and one has a citizenship of Netherlands. An interesting fact is that both of them were born (an made their first steps in science) in Russia. Are these brains Russian or British/Dutch?

Good point and I don't completely disagree with you, but title of article is "Which country has the best brains?" but not "Which country had the best brains?" or "Where were the best brains born"

I agree with you. It is still interesting to see the distribution of the noble winners. It is a good indicator of the countries that fund research and are pioneers in innovation.

I find it interesting that the worlds 2nd and 3rd largest economies, one of which has the worlds largest population, aren't even on the list.

They probably have their own equivalent to the Nobel prize.

Nobels per million people (population figures from putting "population of X" into Google):

US 1.05; UK 1.91; Germany 1.25; France: 0.91; Sweden 3.04

The ordering is very different from the BBC's (12345 -> 52314). I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that you get quite a different top 5 this way too.

Thanks, my immediate reaction to the article was that data normalization was not done. Now with normalized numbers, how 'bout that Swedish nepotism? :)

To be completely correct, you'd need to normalize the prizes over the population of each country at the time each prize was awarded, since population growth (or decline, for germany) patterns are not the same for each of those countries.

What sets America apart is we welcome innovative thinking and fund it more than any other country.

We have private and public institutions that put down the momey for these people.

This creates organic innovation, but also attracts the best minds to our country, who later turn into citizens.

I don't think the peace prize should be counted if one is writing on countries with the "best brains". My understanding is that people who win the peace prize are usually ones fighting an oppressive regime, which is commendable, but not a huge intellectual feat.

On the contrary, it is quite an intellectual feat to lead a large group of people against a powerful oppressive regime. It gets quite difficult as the organization grows and everyone has their own agenda.

I'm disappointed this wasn't some tongue-in-cheek zombie guide.

Given the US/UK's current economic predicament it hurts that they are first/second on economic 'bels.

If we could get the smart people (physics, etc. graduates) from financial-masturbatory zero-sum games on wall street back to productive scientific and engineering enterprises, I'd feel a lot better about things.

And Germany that is doing better relatively is way down.

that was one confusing chart

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