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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

I'd be wary of any such statistics, and trying to draw any conclusion about the current status of a country from that.

For one, the total timeframe of the Nobel Prize is more than a hundred years, and even for individual prizes the time between contribution and award is usually decades. That's a lot of time for possible change in a country.

On top of that, there had been repeated criticism (that has been in part acknowledged by the Swedish Academy) that the Nobel Prize is too eurocentric, so the statistics will obviously be skewed.

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I don't have deep knowledge about the Nobel Prize selection procedure, so I'm not going to go into that. But, obviously, all awards will have some kind of bias because a small group of humans make that decision.

However, the US has more per capita prizes than the EU, so not sure that that critisicm is warranted.

Anyways, I also wouldn't draw any conclusions about "the current status of a country" based on number of nobel laureates. Having said that, I do find the statistics interesting, and I'm sure there are some conclusions to be drawn from it.

There probably are papers analyzing this statistic further - if anyone has some reading recomendations, send them my way :-)

the term "eurocentric" normally isn't about NA vs EU rivalry, but rather about "european identity" in the white supremacist sense. (the caveat is that radical equality is also a distinctly european tradition, but still, this tradition doesn't seem to get included under the "eurocentric" label, for whatever reason)

Ironically, only a Eurocentric worldview could have one believing that "racial equality is a distinctly european tradition"

There were many celebrated anti-racist movement leaders across the world and in various time periods. The most well-known of these would be the Prophet Muhammad, who famously in one of his last sermons declared "Surely all of mankind – from the time of Adam until our time – are like the teeth of a comb (all equal to one another) and there is no greatness for an Arab over a non-Arab or a non-Arab over an Arab and no greatness for a red-skinned person over a black-skinned person or a black-skinned person over a red-skinned person, except due to one’s consciousness of God."

Your username is apt for this comment. Shukran akhi.

i didn't say "racial equality", i meant the radical equality that flattens everything. i'm talking about the tradition that rejects prophets, rejects hierarchy, rejects teleology, etc.

Who were the red-skinned people the Prophet was referring to in 600 AD ?

No, the term "eurocentric" in this context means that for the Nobel prize, european scientists' accomplishments are considered "more worthy" than that of non-Europeans.

And thanks for bringing up how racial equality is a European tradition. How could we forget historical eurocentric bastions of equality, like the study of Phrenology and Kipling's "The White Man's Burden".

ra-di-cal equality. not ra-ci-al equality.

I mean, that concept was considerably developed by Indian thinkers. The only eurocentricism here is that poster's personal bias.

The statistics would be different if based on country of origin, rather than current citizenship or location. Peebles, for example, completed his bachelor's at the University of Manitoba before coming to Princeton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Peebles

You might take this way too seriously.

It's just a fun little statistic for micro-bragging rights.

As someone from another tiny country with self esteem issues, I completely get it.

That's all true, but still it's pretty obvious Switzerland is doing extremely well by any metric you can think of.

They are doing well. As would almost any nation that had enormous wealth from being a tax haven. They profit off of the work of others, as any wealthy nation does today, but they go farther than others.

I disagree. Switzerland produced real value; take a look at companies like Novartis or Roche (or even Nestle). Or the 30 Nobel prize winners, or the top notch academia they have there. You don't do all that just by being a tax haven (Malta and Cayman islands are tax havens as well, also Ireland, but neither is as successful). I have no connection to Switzerland, have only been there once, but when a society works - it works. I acknowledge that.

That's not the reason they have "enormous wealth". I think Switzerland understood early on that it's important for them to invest in science, education and innovation because they don't have any other natural resources.

Incentivizing companies like Google to set up shop in Switzerland of course is related to the low taxes, but also access to talent with great technical schools (ETH, EPFL). Furthermore, companies know that people would love to relocate to Switzerland to work for them. This in turn leads to more money for research, academia and education in general. It's virtuous cylce.

Obviously, there are many more factors. And yes, maybe it helped that there was the bank secracy law and criminals and the Germans during WWII parked their money in Switzerland, but I would say that's not the determining factor.

Disclaimer: I'm Swiss, so probably biased.

Other WWII issues and ethics aside, it puts you ahead when other people wage war and you’re busy doing business. War was huge economic loss for the neighbours, and Switzerland was staying in peace.

If you normalised winners by country wealth Switzerland would still be a top contender.

Obviously?

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