Marginal Revolution: Which universities are declining for revolutionary science?

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Which universities are declining for revolutionary science?

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.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 31, 2006 at 07:32 AM in Education | Permalink

Comments

"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.

Posted by: Samy at Dec 31, 2006 11:38:40 AM

The study's finding that West Coast institutions generally have more nobel laureates than East Coast institutions is not surprising since the study measured where the laureates were at the time they received the Nobel Prize. In most cases, there is a long lag time between the scholar's most important work and the Prize award. As scholars grow older, it would not be surprising to find a move to warmer climes. That, itself, would be an intersting variable to study. Another interesting variable to study would be the institutional affiliation of the scholar at the time he or she did the work cited by the Nobel committee.

Posted by: Dan Cole at Dec 31, 2006 12:00:29 PM

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!

Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Dec 31, 2006 12:20:58 PM

I wonder ... if it's too difficult to study where the scientists were when they did their Nobel-winning work, how about where the scientists got their initial training (i.e. were awarded their PhDs)?

Of course, this would be more likely to measure where science was happening some 30-40 years ago, but it would measure the situations that *produced* Nobel-winning scientists, as opposed measuring the situations that can attract them *after* they've won their Nobels (i.e. high salaries and benefits).

Posted by: Mycroft at Dec 31, 2006 2:05:36 PM

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.

Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 31, 2006 3:02:13 PM

Sorry for the typos above -- that should be "never been a female Economics laureate."

You can find the data on the sex of Nobel winners, as of early 2005, here:

http://www.isteve.com/2005_Education_of_Larry_Summers.htm

Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 31, 2006 3:04:23 PM

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."

Posted by: Ragerz at Dec 31, 2006 3:52:03 PM

A couple more tidbits about UC Irvine... Its building were featured in the "Buck Rogers" series from the late 70s. Basketball icon Tom Tolbert spent a year at UCI before transferring to Arizona and moving on to a less than ordinary NBA career. Oh, and one of those years, we shocked UNLV.

Posted by: Brad Hutchings at Dec 31, 2006 4:14:45 PM

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.

Posted by: spencer at Dec 31, 2006 7:18:18 PM

spencer,

Asking libertarians to justify their top-down all-encompassing psycho theories in the face of actual evidence is a complete waste of time. All the libertarians will do is assume, counterfactually, that no matter how good these public institutions are, if they did not exist, private insitutions would magically come into existence, and perform in a superior manner.

Can you prove them wrong? No. Their theories are not subject to empirical verification. Only when the utopia of minimalist government and maximal greed arrives have their theories been given a fair chance. That day has yet to come (and luckily for libertarians who cling to their beliefs with extreme tenacity) and will never come. So, you can never prove them wrong. But libertarians have faith that if that day did arrive, we would reach the promised land.

In general, it is best not to waste too much of your breath arguing with strong religious beliefs, such as those possessed by libertarians. Do it only if you find it entertaining.

Posted by: Ragerz at Jan 1, 2007 12:05:37 AM

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.

Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Jan 1, 2007 1:27:33 AM

Bruce,

I stand corrected. I am glad you acknowledge the importance of computer science. However, I question your reasons in the earliest essay for suggesting that there should be 3 Nobels for economics, but merely 1 Nobel for computer science? Is economics not only as important as computer science for "revolutionary science" by that is is three times as important?? (Saying it that the work of economists is even equally as important as the work of computer scientists seems absurd. Not that the topic is not as important, but given the methodological limitations under which economists have to strain, those limitations rendering economics something other than a science, it is more difficult to do groundbreaking work in economics compared to computer science.)

One way to think about the relative importance of economics and computer science is to ask how much the two fields have influenced each other. Has economics had as big of an impact on computer science as vice-versa? I think not. I can't imagine economists doing serious modeling without the help of technology produced by computer scientists. Of course, to the extent that economics is the study of scarcity and tradeoffs and computer science has to deal with these very same problems, some economic ideas are relevant to computer science. But if anything, I think economists have more to learn from computer scientists about scarcity and tradeoffs than vice-versa. (The big lesson from computer science being that the dynamic is often much more important than the static.)

So while I am glad that you have included the Turing Award in your analysis, I think your proposal for 3 Nobel Prizes for economics per year compared to 1 for computer science is way off. (Maybe I could live with 1 a year for mathematics. But not for computer science. Not if you think we should be measuring "revolutionary science.")

Posted by: Ragerz at Jan 1, 2007 1:50:21 AM

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.

Posted by: Brad Hutchings at Jan 1, 2007 2:38:15 AM

As someone who has attended both public and private universities, I agree that the differences between them are over-emphasized.

As far as pitting economics versus computer science against each other, I would not do any such thing in the general sense. However, if you are using the number of Nobel Prizes awarded as a means of getting at "revolutionary science," for that particular purpose, I think computer science should get more weight. Certainly, it should not get merely one-third the weight that economics does.

By the way, in my humble opinion, the most important department (now school) at UC Irvine is Information and Computer Science.

Posted by: Ragerz at Jan 1, 2007 3:13:14 AM

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.

Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Jan 1, 2007 10:48:17 AM

As a supplement to the Nobels, I'd recommend the annual $500,000 Crafoord Prize for non-Nobel science. Winners in biosciences alone William. D. Hamilton, Edward .O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, George C. Williams, and John Maynard Smith since its origin in 1982. That's a pretty good list!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crafoord_Prize

Have you ever noticed that the big names of 1960s evolutionary theory sound like the assumed names of men holed up from the law? Bill Hamilton, Ed Wilson, George Williams, and John Smith.

Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jan 1, 2007 7:13:59 PM

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