The 1974 Nobel pairing hid a neoliberal project to legitimize the Mont Pèlerin Society

Evidence

There has grown up an urban legend that Myrdal was inevitably in line for a prize, but that the Swedes disliked him to such an extent that they paired him with Hayek to forever make his life (and legacy) miserable. One might think that credible if one restricted one’s gaze solely to that single prize, but the evidence gathered herein about the longer term suggests otherwise. The rival interpretation is that the committee consisting of one MPS member plus three neoliberals tipped their hand as to their second project in the Bank of Sweden Prize: to lend public credibility to the Mont Pèlerin Society in particular and the neoliberal project in general, by inserting targeted awards intercalated with those to the American orthodoxy. The committee could never have bestowed the award on Hayek alone, since that would have put the kibosh on the prize for good; the purely political character of such a singleton would have left no grounds for plausible deniability. So they paired him with Myrdal to disguise what would soon become a striking run of single-person prizes to MPS members. The prize committee was willing to put up with a modicum of grief concerning the Hayek/Myrdal prize, because it broke the global ice dam which had frozen out the MPS from the realm of legitimate economic discourse since World War II. The ploy worked like a charm for Hayek; numerous historians have commented that his ‘rehabilitation’ as an economist dates from the 1974 prize. Myrdal experienced no such similar rehabilitation, and soon realized he had been a cat’s paw for the neoliberals on the committee. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 525

Categorization

• SEED: The ersatz Nobel as institutional legitimation strategy — angle: how a prize committee smuggled a fringe school into mainstream legitimacy by pairing a real laureate with a decoy. Connects to questions of credentialing and plausible deniability.
• XREF: Connects to Mirowski’s broader work on the ‘Two Nobel Prize Problem’ and to earlier chapters on MPS institutional entrepreneurship, and to the general theme of think-tank credentialism discussed elsewhere in this book. — connects to: The economics Nobel committee was majority-staffed by neoliberal economists during its first six years. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 491; Neoliberal Nobel wins slowed after Lindbeck left the prize committee in 1994 — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 495; The economics profession erased its own history, enabling false innocence about the ersatz Nobel. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 502 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Nobel economics prizes to neoliberals resulted from contingency plus deliberate agenda #corroborates (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 499