TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

A RABBIT PULLED OUT OF A HAT?

“The whole thing happened in twenty-four hours.” That’s how my friend described, somewhat testily, the rapid succession of events that preceded the midday press conference, in Stockholm, at which the creation a “a new Nobel prize” in economic science was announced. That was May 15 1968,

My friend had been a schoolboy when the deal was done, fifty years before. He had grown up to become a distinguished historian, and what he learned from a recent magazine article irritated him. What explains the sense of sleight of hand, a rabbit pulled out of a hat, with which the economics prize apparently was brought into existence? The answer is to be found in events long before that promising day in May.

In fact, the beginning of the story goes even farther back, to 1945, and the end of World War II. You can’t understand of the story of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences without knowing something about the history of Sweden since the Great Depression.