This attempt to render the prize “close but not identical to the real Nobels” was engineered directly by the bank, not by any of the other stakeholders. Lindbeck’s published statement that “the Procedures for the choice of the winner of the economics prize are the same as for the original Nobel prizes” is therefore not strictly correct. If it were true, that would violate the terms of the original agreement that it could not be put on a thoroughgoing equivalent footing with the real Nobels. It is true that the bank managed to get the date of the award to be identical with the other Nobels—December 10—and guaranteed that the Bank of Sweden Prize be bestowed in the very same ceremony as the real Nobels. Outward conformity tends to mask the small but telling ways that signal the ersatz character of the Bank of Sweden Prize. One small sign is that the Bank of Sweden medal, reproduced in Figure 9.1, is of a somewhat different design than the other real Nobel medals.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 470