The 1974 Nobel was shocking because both laureates had lost standing as scientific economists.

Evidence

This long period of wandering in the wilderness of intellectual banishment would have been the first thing to have struck insiders back then about the 1974 prize. Hayek had “lost” status, because he could no longer participate in “scientific economics.” Hence it would seem all the more striking to an outsider like Samuelson that such deference was shown to Hayek in Stockholm, beyond that towards native son Myrdal. Some would say that Myrdal himself had also drifted away from economics in the interim, to something akin to sociology with his work on American segregation and Indian development problems. Yet it was their diametrically opposed politics which drew the most strident commentary. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 516