Perhaps the person most disturbed by the prize was its other recipient. Although he did not decline the award, remorse soon set in, and Myrdal went public a few times in subsequent years suggesting he should have renounced it. He openly questioned the pairing of two such diametrically opposed thinkers in the interests of "balance." In a widely reprinted article, he suggested the award to Milton Friedman in 1976 had finally made him see what was really going on. Economics was not a science like those celebrated by the other Nobels; due to the "confused admixture of science and politics, the awarding of a Nobel Prize in economic science will commonly be conceived as a political act of the Academy. This, of course, is what has happened in the case of Milton Friedman."

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 521