Stephens: Nobels and National Greatness


In its proud and storied history, Hungary has produced a dozen winners of the Nobel Prize: four for chemistry; three for physics; three for medicine; one for economics; and one for literature. Not bad for a little country of not quite 10 million people.

But one curious fact: All of Hungary's laureates ultimately left, or fled, the country. If you are brilliant, ambitious and Hungarian, better get out while you can.

I've spent the past week reading up on the Nobels, mostly to relieve the gloom emanating from Congress, the White House, the State Department, the GOP caucus. It's paralysis time in D.C., and America-in-Decline time on the op-ed pages. Reflecting the global mood, Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, editorialized last week that, with a possible U.S. default on the horizon, "it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world."


How is national greatness best judged? The typical view is that what matters is size: Size of the economy, population, landmass, navy, nuclear arsenal. Hence the hysteria that China may overtake the U.S. in terms of GDP sometime in the next decade. Hence the treatment of middling powers such as Russia (with a GDP roughly that of Italy's) as great powers.

American Nobel winners in economics Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen. ENLARGE
American Nobel winners in economics Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen. jim young/Reuters

But a better metric for greatness is the ability of nations to produce, cultivate, attract and retain intellectual greatness. What is the ratio of Nobel laureates living in any one country to the total population? Russia, with a population of 142 million, has three living Nobel laureates, or one for every 47 million. So much for the land of Pasternak and Sakharov.

A more interesting case is Israel. The Jewish state should be a Nobel powerhouse, given that Jews, 0.2% of the world's population, have won 20% of all Nobels, including six prizes this year alone. But while Israel can claim nine living laureates, three of them live and teach mainly in the U.S. Why? "There are a lot of smart people in Israel and at the same time there was not a job, so he left," Benny Shalev, brother of this year's chemistry winner, Arieh Warshel, explained to the newspaper Haaretz. It isn't enough for countries to produce geniuses. They also have to figure out how to employ them.

Then there is Europe: Half a billion people with a comparatively minuscule Nobel representation. France has, by my count, just 10 living laureates. Germany does better, with nearly 30, although at least nine of them (including Henry Kissinger , physicist Arno Penzias, and this year's medicine winner, Thomas Südhof ), have long lived in the U.S. Britain does about the same as Germany.

Why is Europe such a Nobel laggard? In hindsight, evicting and killing most of its Jewish population was perhaps not the best idea—a lesson that still goes unlearned, considering the feverish efforts on European campuses to boycott Israeli academics.

A more contemporary answer is the pervasive mediocrity of higher education throughout the EU. Cambridge and Oxford aside, the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings list only one European university—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich—in its top 30, and Switzerland isn't even a member of the EU. Most European universities, overcrowded and underfunded, can't hope to compete with their American peers.




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Stuart Scudder
Stuart Scudder subscriber

Unfortunately, Netanyahu, soon to be awarded a Nobel prize for the Palestine pact (if Brett Stephens has his way), is american from Brooklyn that constituted a reverse brain drain from US to Israel..

D Coleman
D Coleman subscriber

I see the Federal Government has its chest-thumping drones out flying this morning!

Dave Bondy
Dave Bondy accountSuspendeduser

Yes, Europeans killed 6 millions Jews only to replace them by 30 million Muslims who by the nature of their culture, see greatness in keeping their women illiterate, and their men fighting against the "intoxicated" European culture.

Paul Scian
Paul Scian subscriber

This raises a corollary question that perhaps is at odds with the standard WSJ perspective.

Given a “mostly private, highly competitive, lavishly endowed university system, juiced by federal funding for fundamental research”

which understates State/Fed support provided to so many colleges and universities in the US, perhaps there really is role for taxes and State involvement in society at large that the WSJ too often dismisses?

Edward Phillips
Edward Phillips subscriber

I'm not sure that our higher educational system is largely private.

Richard Schwenderman
Richard Schwenderman user

", but something isn't translating:"
"The government shutdown is unfortunate; a default would be a disaster."

Not all Nobel are equal. The countries of South Korea, Singapore and Finland do measure up with world class product. Israel is in a class of it's own when population is figured into the equation.
As for the shutdown default disaster, we may get to blast through the Lew 10-17 timeline and find another press fabricated myth about the world coming to an immediate recessionary end. As Nike is found of saying, "Go for it".

Mike Fedele
Mike Fedele subscriber

Fred Hoyle deserves a Nobel some extent it is a popularity contest..the economics prize is a joke

Justin Murray
Justin Murray subscriber

The per-capita GDP of China is $2,100. Sure, it may "surpass" America in raw numbers, but what good is it if the average person can only buy an Apple laptop with their total annual income? 10% of $2,100 is $210 in growth per person. America's 2% translates into $750 in growth. Chinese growth looks good only because the country is so poor, but at the end of the day, China is still falling behind America. Our paltry 2% still produces 3 times as much raw growth. That's the thing about being big - the percentages start to shrink.

Wilson Woo
Wilson Woo subscriber

I appreciate this article as a reminder of the greatness of this country and the kind of people that it has drawn.

However, Economics (not really a Nobel prize) and literature aside and forget about the "peace" prize, you should be warned that this may not last as long as our stupid government continues to cut funding for science. It will take at least a generation to see the decline in numbers. Did you know that at the present time, the NIH, for instance, funds only less than 10% of the grant applications it receives, which is a 200% decline compared to only 10-15 years ago? And also did you know that the vast majority of the grants funded by the NIH cost only 250K A YEAR per investigator, compared to, let's say, 1 million dollars A DAY to keep an aircraft carrier going?

You are right; there are many smart people in America. Unfortunately, many of the dumbest ones appear to be running our country.

Dean Schulze
Dean Schulze user

"...the gloom emanating from Congress, the White House, the State Department, the GOP caucus"

Here in fly over land I haven't noticed any gloom as a result of the current shutdown / slimdown. The economy is still stagnant, but most of us manage to overcome it.

The media and the political class consider Washington to be the nexus of everything in the US, but nothing could be further from the truth. We make the country work in spite of Washington and the political class.

Max Davies
Max Davies subscriber

The hard-science Nobels that US-based researchers won in recent years came out of work done decades earlier, almost all of it in government-funded research labs or in private universities working under government contracts. The basic research that wins hard-science Nobels originates under public-funding. We were once much better than most other nations at funding such basic research, but that was decades ago and now we are discarding our lead in the name of "drowning government in a bathtub" and other such nonsense.

Don't crow about our crop of Nobel prizes in 2014 Mr Stephens; they were won under conditions of government investment that you have passionately decried and demonstrate the utter folly of the policies you advocate.

Cato Vaysman
Cato Vaysman subscriberprofilePrivate

We are still better than anyone else but this is no longer a great consolation.

Matthew Sailhardy
Matthew Sailhardy subscriber

We can discount two American Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Al Bore and Barack Obama won theirs because they were not George W. Bush, an achievement of dubious worth.

Gerard Muller
Gerard Muller subscriber

Nobels get the headlines but patents are a better indicator of current intellectual energy of a country or region.

By that measure the US does well but other regions do better. While the US has about 1.8 million patents in force, Western Europe has well over 2.1 million patents in force. Japan, with a little over a third of the population of the US, has 1.3 million patents in force. while South Korea with 1/6 of our population has 0.6 million patents in force. Put another way, Japan and South Korea together, with half the population of the US, have about the same number of patents in force.

A good example of why Nobels, which primarily involve research, are not a good indicator of a countries technical prowess, while patents are is the development of Lithium-Ion batteries. The research on these types of batteries was largely done in the US and Europe. In fact it was first proposed by British researcher, M.S. Whittingham while working at Exxon in the early 70s. However the first real production of a Li-Ion battery was by Sony in 1991. Since then Japan and South Korea have come to control the Li-Ion battery market with 80% of the world's production while the US produces about 2%.

The development and commercialization of Li-Ion batteries led to an even bigger technical development with the production of hybrid cars, notably the Toyota Prius, which incorporates Li-Ion batteries, IC engines, and regenerative braking, developments which taken together constitute a revolutionary development in transportation, yet I'm not aware of any Nobels awarded to its developers.

Wayne Schindler
Wayne Schindler

How is it that this is not just another popularity contest? When Obama won the prize for no accomplishments, that makes it quite clear that the criteria is who is voting and not what the candidates accomplishments are.

Frederick C. Kurz
Frederick C. Kurz user

Nobel Prizes go to uncommon people with their big discoveries. What about the common people with all of their little discoveries? Doesn't an exceptional nation need both?

Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts subscriber

Individuals thrive when and where government is limited. Where will most of the laurels be two generations from now?

Robert Wood
Robert Wood subscriber

Stephens misleads wrt Europe. To measure potential he cites the entire population of Europe. But to measure success, he cites the statistics of individual European countries. It's like claiming that the US is doing poorly because very few if any laureates have been produced by the state of Iowa even though the population of the US is 350 million.

In addition, several people have commented on the fact that current laureates reflect on the production of 20-30 years ago. During that time Europe was finally recovering from the devastation caused by Germany's assaults on the rest of Europe in World Wars I and II. East and West Germany were rejoined in 1990.

Paula Dowling
Paula Dowling


I'd rather take a look a video and draw my own conclusions.

Dear Leader's speech was made just a few months before the 2012 election but the million sof low-information voters weren't paying attention.

patrice ayme
patrice ayme user

It does not dawn on the naïve Mr. Stephens that the Nobel prize may be an indication of bias, not excellence. A mark of propaganda, thus weakness, not a proof of superiority.

The university classification system is riddled by tricks to make universities of the USA look good, relatively speaking. For example French Nobels are counted… half for the universities the work for (for devious reasons).

Another example: Switzerland has 22 Nobels in science, France, only 35. However, Switzerland is not, historically speaking, the author of major breakthroughs in science and technology. Or actually not of ANY breakthrough. France is.

So what is taught, and impressed upon, is lots of lies. Take aviation: France dominated it by 1910. But were not the Wright brothers Americans? Sure, and they invented a number of useful devices. However, the first motorized flights were made 13 years earlier, using a light weight steam engine, in a French military program (Clement Ader).

Some will object: ah, but Switzerland had Einstein (more or less refugee from Germany), and he invented E = mcc, it's well known. While in Bern. Well known, but somewhat of a cheat: Einstein actually stole both the formula and the proof from work published by Poincare' in 1900, five years earlier, in the most well known Dutch Physics Journal (Lorentz, a Dutch who wrote the space-time transformation law was from there, and Poincare' got him the Nobel by 1904).

So why is E = mcc Einstein's formula and not Poincare'? Because reality in the dominant Anglo-Saxon-Germanoid culture has a well known anti-French bias. Much better to have a German Jew the author of E= mc^2 than some super genius Frenchman. That would tell us, that, if there is one super genius Frenchman, there might be more, and thus a financial transaction tax may not be such a bad idea. Hence the official plutocratic propaganda shall insist that French frogs have no brains, and never bathe.

And bias does not stop at France. Bose, an Indian genius, who got the idea of bosons, the force particles, with their weird statistics, never got the Nobel in physics: because British imperialists objected to Bose's opinions in matters political.

So what do we see? Lots of Nobels in the USA's "private" universities. Does that mean those people got the most fundamental ideas? Not so sure.

When Eric Kandel went to Paris, he spent a year learning to work with Aplysia, and later got the Nobel for his remarkable work on learning. However, did the Paris teachers got the Nobel? No. Who started that flow of research and originated the basic ideas? Not necessarily Kandel.

And so on. In many fields, most people sitting in the Nobel committee are American, so maybe the Nobel ought to be called the "American prize", a bit like the "Academy Awards".

It would be most profitable, in the realm of ideas, to determine who and how the best and deepest ideas arose. Start by attributing the discovery of the First Law of Newton, the law of inertia, to Buridan, who discovered and advertized it, three centuries before Newton was born. Buridan was the rector of the university of Paris, adviser to kings (among others), contradictor of Aristotle, and discovered Copernic's work 170 years before it was taught to Copernicus at the university of Cracow, where Copernicus was a student.

What truly count, for intellectual superiority, is, who got the big idea first, and how deep. The rest is propaganda at best, and outright thievery, racism and hatred, at worst.

Joel Dubow
Joel Dubow user

I pray that Stephens is right but I fear he isn't. What we are seeing now is a twilight of the Gods. According to studies I've read, each succeeding generation after the post sputnik generation is falling further and further behind international peer groups. US education seems to focus more on political outcomes than on educational achievement. At this point reform is looking increasingly unlikely.

The only way to get higher ratings is to alter the scoring rules to include the subjects of political correctness, male self-loathing, and anti-nationalism. The US will be unquestioned number one in those three subjects. Orwell would be proud, or at least very amused.

Paula Dowling
Paula Dowling

All I need to know about the "prestigious" Nobel Prize is that the Peace Noble Prize of 2009 was awarded and ACCEPTED by a Chicago thug for having a last name different from "Bush".

Today the droppings of a street dog have more value than the Nobel Prize.

JEFFREY ASHER subscriber

An auspicious moment to examine intra-national claims of intellectual equality and excellence:

As of 2006, women ranked as 4.5% (n=35) of Nobel Prize laureates, with two-thirds of their awards in Literature and Peace. Nineteen Prizes were won by organizations. The remaining 744 Prizes were earned by men. The 48 recipients of the Fields Medal - viewed as the top honor a mathematician can receive - are all men.

At the IQ mean, the lowest cited male advantage is +3.6 IQ points. Irving & Lynn’s meta-analysis found the male advantage at about +4.6 IQ; Jackson & Rushton show +5.0 IQ. Nyborg cites +6.90 IQ points; Strumpf & Jackson measure +8.4 IQ.


Next, a quota representation demand for Nobel Prizes?

Jeffrey Asher
--- --- ---

Rodney Adams
Rodney Adams subscriber


To be expected, five years after the United States made a national suicide pact with Obama and his deluded followers.

Ronald Pavellas
Ronald Pavellas user

I belong to no religion, nor pray to any named deity, but I assert the USA’s greatest freedom and its source of greatness is the freedom of religion. The government cannot, and should not, effectively set values for a polity. The religions of personal choice, freely exercised in a general atmosphere of acceptance, set the values for the people who comprise the polity.

Jay Xie
Jay Xie

A typical Bret Stephens piece, in which real insight is often lacking.

Nobel Prize winnings are given to discoveries done long time ago. It is a trailing indicator, often by several decades. The original Higgs Boson Hypothesis was proposed in the 60s, when sadly China was in the midst of the mad Cultural Revolution -- not only then college level of education was non-existent, but also the expected lifetime school-hours of Chinese then was like 20% of their American counterparts. (today greater than 100%)

Between 1901 and 1919, there was only 1 American-born Nobel Prize winners in natural sciences, compared to 6 Dutchmen and 20 Germans. Should you short America in 1919?

Charles Smith
Charles Smith subscriber

While I don't disagree with the sentiment, Mr. Stephens, I do believe your misreading the facts. Nobel Prize winners are lagging indicators. Most prizes are awarded after sufficient time has passed to prove/support the theory or work being awarded, which normally translates into a lifetime. Assuming a 30 year period, the awards you saw from 2000 to today represent the minds cultivated in the 70s and 80s. The educated masses today will select their winners in 30 or 40 years.

In summary, the past performance does not gaurantee future success.

Brian Seel
Brian Seel subscriber

What a horrible article. These guys are all north of 60, some in their 70s and those being recognized in Economics are being recognized for work decades ago.

Look at our current fiscal state and tell me who from America is going to win a Nobel Prize for Economics in 30 years? Barack Obama for finding out precisely how much debt a country can take on before you go into the abyss?

Greg Brown
Greg Brown subscriber

Academia is purging all independent thought, leaving behind mostly conformist mediocrities. It started in the humanities and is now infecting the sciences to the extent possible. If the US maintains its lead it will only be because the rest of the world experiences proportionate decline

Richard Tauchar
Richard Tauchar user

Bret Stephens, can you honestly claim that it matters that Americans win Nobel prizes, in terms of directing where the country is heading?

I thought not.

It is a distinctly US preoccupation to worry about which nation is "greatest". Bret wants to use Nobel prizes to keep score, as a measure of "intellectual greatness". But who cares, as long as we face intractable problems such as the irreconcilable red/blue ideological split and a fragmented multicultural landscape in which people identify more closely with their racial kindred than with other Americans? How are the Nobel prize winners going to move America toward a brighter future, given those differences?

Given our social problems, which lead to economic problems, it is irrelevant if the US is "greater" intellectually, as long as people living in certain other countries are more satisfied with their lives and their countries.

Justin Murray
Justin Murray subscriber

I should get a Peace Prize. I'm not George Bush either. Then again, the Nobel Committee would go bankrupt with that criteria. It's hard to build 7 billion medals.

Troy Danekes
Troy Danekes subscriber

Patents are an interesting indicator but it reminds me of something I saw yesterday. I was at a children's museum where they just opened up an exhibit to teach kids about money and finances. About a dozen kids were participating in a game: 3 teams, 3 boxes of giant Legos, and on these blocks were taped various denominations of money. 2 teams built short stacks, one team built a tall stack. You win when your stack isn't the highest, but which stack comprises the most money. You might see where I'm going with this. The team that built a tall stack only had about $50 in blocks represented, while both the teams who built short stacks had over $150 in blocks, so they won.

Point is, doesn't matter if Europe has 2.1 million patents; 1 million of those could be for book-lights and espresso machines. We may have less patents, but they are far more valuable.

Dean Schulze
Dean Schulze user

Stephens would have done better to leave out the peace prize. The peace prize committee is an embarrassment to the legacy of Alfred Nobel.

Troy Danekes
Troy Danekes subscriber

The Peace Prize is the popularity contest; and I'll argue the Literary Prize too. But for Economics, Chemistry, all the sciences, the winners must show results. Higgs won because CERN proved the particle named after him does indeed exist.

David Kreda
David Kreda subscriber


You're just on a tear of stunning stupidity!

Why does your narrow, insipid, and terrifically angry little mind get off this way? And, while you're laboriously pondering what I might mean, please note that the posed question is not half as mean as it is honest! Moreover, you are no less unwise to share your profoundly anti-democratic sensitiblities. Although I am sure you won't spare us from further insults as you heap on America, your speaking so unfondly of those whom you call low information voters, the one who, forturnately for you, are not so anti-democratic as you, that you seem to have left out how that particularly interesting alternative, Mitt Romney, who, I guess would be your idea of a, oh, non-Dear Leader someone, whom "high information voters" would like. Tsk, he sort of lost out in his appeal, did he not? You'd think it was due to their not being enough high information voters. Oddly, if you were numerate, well-informed, and sensible, you'd see, sadly, that your opinion did not fit with the data, Karl Rove's fictions aside. Sure, for you, it is a conundrum. But, really, for a narrow, insipid, and terrifically angry little mind, what is not a conundrum?

Good luck. You need it.


Thomas Daly
Thomas Daly

Stopped one war, working on stopping the next.

Rodney Adams
Rodney Adams subscriber

I hear that another thug, a Mr. Putin, may also get a "Peace Prize."

Never mind the fact that he is bedfellows with a mass murderer.

Which entirely makes your point about the worth of this "prize."

Brian Kearns
Brian Kearns profilePrivateuser


That is absolutely right. The President has said he will not negotiate under the threat of the shut down and debt limit. These are proverbial 'guns to the head' My earlier point is that it is not a negotiation. The House Republicans offer is 'Give us (fill in the blank) or we will let the government shut down or Default.'

That is not a negotiation. That is not bargaining in good faith.

A negotiation would be, 'If you give us (fill in the blank) we will give you(fill in the blank).

I thought you recognized that.

Brian Kearns
Brian Kearns profilePrivateuser

To Mauricio,

You were doing so good, until you brought up $4 a gallon gasoline.

How do you think gasoline prices are set?

We, as a country, with Obama's energy policies, are very nearly at the point where we will be energy independent. And yet, the world market drives pricing. They are not going down any time soon, and it has nothing to do with our President, or his policies.

Fast and Furious, if you are still talking about that, you have not read what really went on. Check out Fortune magazine, they did an in depth story.

Benghazi. While unfortunate to lose 4 Americans, we seem to have lost a lot more in wars started by the previous administrations. Oh, and I did a quick search and the were some thirteen attacks similar to Benghazi during the Bush administration. Don't see those being dredged up over and over again.

The IRS thing, seems like a regional office run amok. I'm sure you view it as a vast conspicy, but from what I read about it, it was not nearly nefarious as the right suggests.

Brian Kearns
Brian Kearns profilePrivateuser

I think we should shrink government, lets lay off another million government workers. That should help unemployment. Well, they don't pay taxes do they?

I know the defecit is trending down, and approaching historical norms for percentage of GDP, but lets eliminate all the basic scince research the government is involved in. And we could stop inspecting meat. I was thinking of becoming a vegetarion anyways. Might move next to a cement plant, I'm sure those noxious fumes are safe. We have got to keep buying those F-35's thou. All three versions. Love that plane. Dirt cheap. See the Chinese are bagging out of their stealth plane.

But yes, we need a 'Grand Bargain' with EVERYTHING on ther table, well averything except Obamacare. We need to give that a ride for a while. With both sides negotiating in good faith. Again, kinda hard to do, if the other side refuses to negotiate, or worse, for Tea Partiers, to COMPROMISE. (and no, you are too smart to say the Democrats should be negotiating over the shutdown. Negotiations are a two way street, and Republican/Tea Partiers have not offered anything in return)

Brian Kearns
Brian Kearns profilePrivateuser

Or maybe it was the Republican house pact to declare it's refusal to work with a new president, before he had even taken office, and veering even further right to take the economy right to the brink of destruction.

Chaz Palm
Chaz Palm subscriber

Xie Syansheng...

The point of the article is not about the soil under your mother at the time of your birth but the culture/society/system from which one's talents can flow.

You're being too defensive...

Brian Kearns
Brian Kearns profilePrivateuser

hoepfully we can shrink the government, stop all scientific funding, especially fundamental research, including to universities, sit back and cross our fingers.


You really do have a distorted view of current events, don't you? You studiously avoid all mention of Obama's refusal to consider the Keystone Pipeline as a means of increasing the "energy independence" you claim he has engendered (although you appear to be the only one here who can even define his "energy policies."). In fact, your tiresome diatribe is rather like a budget tour of mainstream media propaganda. The complete story of Fast and Furious is still unfolding, so just how "in depth" could Fortune's analysis have been? As for Benghazi, since only 4 lives were lost, that makes it unworthy of further investigation-- especially since more lives were lost in Iraq and Afghanistan? and, good grief! Under previous administrations? ( In other words, if I kill my wife that would be less egregious because other men before me have killed their wives?) Why not extend your "quick search(es)" and superficial comparisons back to Vietnam? to Korea? to the Spanish-American War? Finally, once you dismissed the IRS debacle as nothing more than "a regional office run amok," (Lois Lerner's Fifth Amendment plea notwithstanding), and as no more than a crackpot conspiracy theory-- "from "what (you) read about it"-- well, then I knew for sure that we were dealing with a democrat party stooge who is capable of doing little more than regurgitating ludicrous progressive talking points.

Paula Dowling
Paula Dowling

Yes Brian it's all the GOP's fault. The huge debt incurred by Dear Leader, the nonexistent jobs, the IRS scandal, Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the 4-dollars-a-gallon oil prices, ALL OF IT!

Rodney Adams
Rodney Adams subscriber

In case you had not noticed, we are almost 17 trillion in debt. The R's are merely trying to slow down the rate at which the debt increases, while the D's act like it does not exist.

But Krugman told you not to worry about it, right?

Well then, who are you to think for yourself?

After all, the liberal elite do that for you, eh?

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