Nobel economics prizes to neoliberals resulted from contingency plus deliberate agenda

Evidence

All and sundry treat this as some sort of marvelous confirmation that the Swedish Prize committee miraculously manages to power through all the noise and flummery of “irrelevant” considerations to an objective valuation of the truth in economics; but of course, there is another more historically accurate and ultimately more insightful explanation of these events. It consists of the combination of some elements of pure historical contingency, along with other actions of the most direct and unabashed intentionality. The dose of contingency came in the form of the Swiss Connection to the Swedish central bank, the audacity of Per Åsbrink in pursuing an ersatz Nobel, and the alliance of convenience between Åsbrink and a set of Swedish economists bent upon rolling back the Swedish welfare state. Of course, Swedes harboring those sorts of political ambitions would tend to be familiar with many of the neoliberal protagonists of the MPS in the late 1960s, and indeed would include in their number a few actual MPS members. Once those stochastic preconditions were baked into place, the subsequent sequence of events was more or less due to premeditated planned agendas. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 499

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the reader’s goal of fracturing the neoliberal caricature — the MPS/Nobel story parallels how the Milgrom law-merchant work shows institutions shaped by private agendas rather than market purity. — connects to: The Nobel Prize initially marginalized Friedman but later legitimized the MPS school — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 514; Neoliberals themselves devised ideological scorekeeping of Nobel economics winners — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 510; The economics prize consciously moved the profession in a neoliberal direction — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 484 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• The economics prize consciously moved the profession in a neoliberal direction #expands (0.82) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 484
• Neoliberals themselves devised ideological scorekeeping of Nobel economics winners #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 510
• The Nobel economics prize was created to win public deference for central bank independence #contradicts (0.78) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 476