The bank, not the academies, staffed the economics prize committee.

Evidence

Far more importantly, the constitution of the prize committee did not parallel that of the other real Nobels. Alfred Nobel’s will stipulated that the prize committees be chosen and staffed for the natural science Nobels by the designated Royal Academies. There was no Royal Swedish Academy of Economics, so presumably this meant that, if it truly mimicked the real science Nobels, the prize would have to be controlled by the Royal Academy of Sciences. However, it seems in retrospect that the bank itself was active in constituting the original Economics prize committee. For instance, one key player in the narrative, Assar Lindbeck, was not a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when appointed to the committee; according to his own vita, that did not occur until 1971. Another member, Ragnar Bentzel, was not inducted until 1972. Much of this suggests Academy membership being bestowed as an afterthought to being appointed to the Bank of Sweden committee, to hide the flouting of the rules. Since the composition of the prize committee plays a dominant role in our subsequent narrative, this divergence from the real Nobels was not an insignificant detail. The bank, having gone to such great lengths to institute the prize, was not going to simply withdraw altogether from the stipulation of what sort of economists would benefit from it, at least at the outset. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 472

Categorization

• QUESTION: This seat at the prize committee’s creation is the lever for the whole book’s premise — worth verifying exactly what pre-existing economic networks the bank drew the original committee from.