The Nobel Still Outranks Its Richer Rivals

John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis will share this year’s physics Nobel equally:^[1] a third of 11 million kronor each, or about $390,000 at the Riksbank’s October 9 rate of 9.46 kronor per U.S. dollar.^[2] The chemistry^[3] and medicine^[4] prizes were split three ways too. In April, the Breakthrough Prize awarded six prizes of $3 million each,^[5] more than two and a half times a full Nobel. The Templeton Prize’s^[6] founder set its purse above the Nobel’s on purpose. On money, the rivals have caught up. The Nobel is still the gold standard. Its money is welcome and has little to do with why. What it offers is a long history and a short list, and no sponsor can buy either.

The Nobel has survived a thin purse before. The Nobel Foundation’s^[7] own inflation-adjusted table values the first full prize, 150,782 kronor in 1901, at 10.8 million December 2024 kronor. By 1919 it was worth 28% of that. From 1941 through 1982, the prize stayed below 40% of its first value, averaging about a third, and it did not climb back above the 1901 level until 1991. In 2012 the Foundation cut the prize 20%^[8] to protect its capital. If the check made the name, those four decades should have broken it.

Value of a full Nobel Prize, nominal and inflation-adjusted, 1901 to 2024

Those decades did not break the name, as the rivals’ own pitches show. The Lasker Foundation^[9] says 101 of its laureates have also received the Nobel Prize. The Kavli Prize,^[10] which pays $1 million in each of its fields, counts 10 laureates who won a Nobel after winning the Kavli. The Association for Computing Machinery^[11] says its Turing Award, which carries $1 million, is “often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize in Computing.’” The Turing and Kavli awards each pay about 86% of a full Nobel and still sell themselves with its name.

The strongest case against me is that scarcity has become a blind spot. Alfred Nobel’s will named three sciences,^[12] so mathematics and computing have no Nobel, and the Foundation’s statutes forbid dividing a prize among more than three people. Big science no longer comes in threes: this year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics recognized 13,508 co-authors^[5] of papers from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. On this view, a prize that cannot see how discoveries are made will lose its signal to prizes that can. The Nobel itself started rich, and a big purse is how a young prize buys attention while it builds a history. I accept the cost. The Nobel will keep missing whole fields and most of the people on large teams, and the newer prizes are good backstops for that work. Given decades, one of them could earn a standing like the Nobel’s, and a big purse would help it get there. None has yet, and money cannot backdate a record. We can have dozens of prizes for math and computer science. There is still only one Nobel, and its scarcity is the product: since 1901, 229 people have won the physics prize,^[13] beginning with Wilhelm Röntgen.

Nobel committees can squander what a sponsor cannot buy. On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee^[14] awarded the peace prize to María Corina Machado, and its chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, was asked about the public push^[15] by President Donald Trump and his allies for the award. The committee, he told reporters,^[16] “sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates” and bases its decisions only on “the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.” That room is the asset, and it took 124 years to fill. A committee that looked lobbied could spend it in a single October.