The University of Chicago likes to brag about its Nobel laureates. Well, my son’s kindergarten teacher Christina Hayward pulled off a feat that is far tougher statistically than winning the Nobel prize: she took one of ten Golden Apple awards given annually to the most outstanding Chicago-area teachers.
Why do I say it is tougher to win a Golden Apple than a Nobel prize? My rough guess is that there are about 100,000 teachers in the Chicago area. So one in 10,000 teachers wins the prize. By comparison, the pool of people eligible for the Nobel prize in economics is roughly the number of living academic economists over the age of 55 who have ever engaged in serious research. I’d be surprised if there are 10,000 of these folks; and only two or three of them get the Nobel prize every year.
The Golden Apple is tougher to win than the Nobel prize, but unfortunately the payoff isn’t quite as lucrative: $3,000 versus $1 million.
You can read more about Christina here.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Steven, If you read the article you yourself recommend about Christina, then you will find out :
“She was one of 10 winners from a pool of 972 nominees from Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake and Will counties.”
Following your same logic to consider economist, since you have to be nominated to win, the odds of winning are one in 97.2. A thousand times “easier” than winning a Nobel Prize.
Still the odds of winning the Golden Apple are in line with the Odds of either the Rams, Raiders or Chiefs winning the Superbowl, so she should feel proud, but not believe your adulation.
It would be interesting to have a follow up article, to see if your son grades improved after you published the article.
By harder, he means it’s less likely, not that more work was done.
The real question is this. What % of economists are reasonably competitive on the Nobel prize as compared to what % of teachers are reasonably competitive for the golden apple? Sadly, I would probably think that the former is much higher than the latter given the sorry state of our public school system and the fact that teaching is a fairly secure job, unlike the general “Publish or die!” mantra of scholarly economics. There may not be as many, but I am willing to bet that the competition is a bit more fierce among economists than amongst teachers.
How old are you now, Steven? *laugh*
I think other commenters have already taken apart the argument in multiple ways; let me add one more.
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
–Richard Feynman
There are many little-known awards that one can aspire to, but only one award with the prestige of the Nobel prize. As a thought experiment, what if I made up my own “World’s Most Awesome Person Award” for $1 (since you don’t seem to think low prize money makes it less worthy), and gave it a random person? They would have won an award with an a-priori probability of 1 in 6 billion. Now what if everyone in the world made up their award? Then you’d have billions of people who’ve won awards that are less likely than the Nobel Prize.
$3,000, a personal computer AND a Spring sabbatical? So the reward for being one of the best teachers in Chicago is a break from teaching?
> With so few astronauts out there, I think landing on the moon is probably the easiest thing ever!
Not exactly *easiest*. I mean, the number of people who were available to the Macedonian Empire at its peak were:
1. Phillip of Macedon
2. Alexander the Great
50% of the candidates of the subset in question conquered the known world. Far less than 50% of astronauts have landed on the moon. Therefore it is clearly easier to conquer the known world than it is to land on the moon.
As others have said, I think this Steve takes a very BSish perspective on this. It’s a little bit like saying “1 in 100 people get cancer ever year and 1 in 30 pro baseball players are on the winning team in the World Series, therefore it’s easier to win the World Series than get cancer. QED”