Founded in 1901, the Nobel Prize is awarded each year to individuals “who have brought the greatest benefit to humanity” – as stated in Alfred Nobel’s will. We only have to mention Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1921, or Marie Curie, who was crowned in physics and chemistry, to give an idea of the prestige attached to this prize. But can everyone really participate? In other words, this statistical rarity that is intellectual excellence is distributed among 8 billion humans, but is it equally distributed like a few needles hidden at random in a haystack? It is to this question thatan article of four economists, Paul Novosad, Sam Asher, Catriona Farquharson and Eni Iljazi, who analyzed the journey and origins of 739 laureates from 1901 to 2023, attempts to answer. They only retained the profiles of chemists, physicists, doctors and economists, excluding the Nobel Prizes for Literature and Peace (to the extent that choices in these “disciplines” are sometimes made on political or economic criteria). different). In the field of science, there is no doubt, it is excellence that claims to be rewarded.
Given that the population studied spans more than a century, it seemed wise to the authors, to identify the social origin of the winners, to only retain the level of education and income of the father (given that women have only gradually joined the education and employment market over the years). Moreover, unsurprisingly, women represent barely 4% of the winners and they come from very privileged backgrounds. This economic reality is not surprising and is confirmed among men. Of the entire population of winners, half of them come from the richest 5% category in their country. And what did their fathers do? Most of them owned a business, large or small. There are also doctors, professors and engineers in larger proportions than in the general population. A more interesting fact: we observe the emergence of Nobel in areas characterized by upward social mobility (which is understandable) but also downward (which is less understandable). The authors’ explanation is that when there is a reversal of fortune in a family, children do not have the opportunity to revel in the benefits of inheritance and therefore potentially turn to other types of careers. .
There are, of course, exceptions to this social selection for intellectual virtuosity. Daniel Tsui, for example, Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1998, is the child of illiterate farmers in Henan, China. We can also notice that things have improved since the authors of the article were able to measure that between 1901 and today, even if social selection remains drastic, the opportunities to access this holy grail of scientific consecration have double. The most distressed will point out that at this rate, it will be necessary to wait six hundred and eighty-eight years for equality of opportunity to be achieved in this area.
There is therefore obviously no uniform distribution of intellectual excellence distinguished by a Nobel in the entire population. This result, which might seem trivial, nevertheless implies something essential: humanity loses a significant part of its geniuses. The study even conjectures that 90% of the world’s scientific talent is not reaching its potential. Whichever way you look at the subject, it’s an unacceptable waste. When we do not provide the social conditions for intellectual development, we agree to play the morbid casino of deprivation of virtuosity for the common good. As paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his book Panda’s Thumb : “I’m less interested in the weight of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
* Gérald Bronner is a sociologist and professor at Sorbonne University
.