In a short paper, he indicated that we should stare intently at the Bank of Sweden as a major protagonist in the inception of the prize, and that the process needed to be understood in terms of the effects it was intended to produce: "this prize does not exist: and moreover, … this so-called 'Nobel prize' is an extraordinary case study in the successful transformation of economic capital into symbolic capital, a transformation which greatly inflates the symbolic power of the discipline of economics in the public mind."

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 459