The neoliberal thought collective has been so fascinated by the ersatz Nobel and its implications that they themselves have devoted substantial resources to taking the ideological temperature of each and every prize winner. In effect, neoliberals strive to have summary box scores, in order to gauge whether or not, from their vantage point, they are winning, and by how much. … As in so many other cases of the political sociology of science, one finds that it was the NTC that managed to get there first.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 510