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I wonder how this would look if corrected for the size of a country, or for the number of scientific publications per country. Apart from that, Nobel prizes are often given for research conducted/completed 10+ years earlier, this may distort the graph a bit.
Directly correlating economic prosperity and number of winners might be a bit inaccurate, this graph primarily shows US capacity to attract top researchers.
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Good point. Just counting prizes in physics, the UK has earned 21 whereas the US has gotten 54. The UK has a population of 61M whereas the US is 307M. Therefore, the UK has won the Nobel in physics at a higher rate. If the US matched their rate, they should have 104 prizes by now.
Of course, there might be some European bias, especially going back to earlier prizes, or other factors. It would also be interesting to see a graph that indicated where the research was performed. For example, the 2011 prize in chemistry went to Dan Shechtman, who is an Israeli, but performed the research in the US. This graph doesn't seem to give the 2011 Chem prize to the US, however you could argue that it was prize earned in the US.