The Swedish Riksbank prize committee deliberately laundered the Mont Pèlerin Society into orthodox economics.

Evidence

The outsized representation of MPS in the ersatz Nobel was a direct consequence of Per Åsbrink creating the nascent Swedish Prize committee from scratch, and then accessing the same cabal of right-leaning Swedish economists and Riksbank consultants who had helped him get the ersatz Nobel off the ground to staff its bureaucratic structure. These scholars, consisting of Assar Lindbeck, Erik Lundberg, and Ragnar Bentzel, with the tacit cooperation of Bertil Ohlin, sought to bolster the intellectual credibility of their program by initially making the prize seem “apolitical” for the first five years, only then to embark on a number of awards (including one to Ohlin himself) designed to make the hard-right MPS appear as a legitimate orthodox component of world economics. In other words, they laid the groundwork for the program described by Lindbeck: “fiscal discipline and an independent Riksbank in combination with deregulation,” and subsequently pursued by the Riksbank. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 500

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did this deliberate politicization of the ersatz Nobel go unexamined for so long within the profession, given how explicit the paper trail is?
• XREF: This connects to the broader institutional capture narrative in Mirowski’s ‘Machine Dreams’ / ‘Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste’. — connects to: The Riksbank bullied Sweden into legislating an ersatz Nobel Prize. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 469

Broader Connections

• The Riksbank bullied Sweden into legislating an ersatz Nobel Prize. #expands (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 469