Two Nobel prizes in literature will be awarded this year—to make up for the lack of one in 2018, following scandals around the Swedish Academy. Since 1901, more than 800 citizens and institutions from across 72 countries have been awarded a Nobel Prize in recognition of their academic, cultural, and scientific achievements. But there have been no Brazilians on that list. Why is that?
The short answer is education. Of the six Nobel Prize categories, only two are not utterly dependent on an excellent education: peace and literature. It is something of a consensus that Brazilian institutions are not yet capable of producing groundbreaking research in most fields analyzed by the Nobel committee: chemistry, physics, medicine, and economics.
For the sake of argument, we can compare Brazil to the country which is home to the highest number of laureates, the U.S., with 259. Forty-two percent of American adults graduate from a university; in Brazil, only 11 percent obtain an academic degree. But this result is by no means simply a matter of quantity, as the quality...
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