EP 02 - Neoliberalism: lunatics take over the asylum

Neoliberalism: lunatics take over the asylu

- Episode 02-

‘The Cuckoo in the Nobel nest’

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'The Cuckoo in the Nobel nest'

13 November 2024

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NEW SERIES Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Milton Friedman and his Chicago mates never won the intellectual argument in the 1970s so why were they so successful?

Fake Nobel Prize slammed by Peter Nobel - Sweden's first Ombudsman for discrimination, Secretary General of the Swedish Red Cross (1991–94), and an expert for the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

'Cuckoo in the Nest'

Whatever we have all been told, neither Fritz Hayek nor Milton Friedman, nor any of the other neoliberal economists, ever in fact won a Nobel Prize for Economics. The reason is that no such thing has exists.

Five Nobel Prizes, in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace, have been awarded every year since 1901. They were established under the will of the Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel. But in 1968 the Sveriges Riksbank, the national bank of Sweden, invented a new prize. They called it the Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel.

The Sveriges Riksbank prize is, said Peter Nobel, a descendant of the founder and a Swedish human rights lawyer, ‘the cuckoo in the Nobel nest.’ It has ‘nestled itself in and is awarded as if it were a Nobel Prize. But it is a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation.’

Back in 1968, the governor of the Riksbank, Per Åsbrink, was fighting a bitter struggle with Sweden’s Social Democratic government. Åsbrink was determined to free the bank from government control. With a fake ‘Nobel prize’ in their pocket, the bank’s favourite economists would be able to make the case for a free market in banking.

But when Åsbrink asked the Nobel family to use the bank’s money to create a fifth Nobel prize, they turned him down…

Big business sponsors TV series to show that freedom from welfare, freedom from state education and freedom from state medical care makes life better

'Free to Choose' PBS TV Series

In 1977 American Public Broadcasting commissioned a 10-part television series to be presented by Milton Friedman and entitled Free to Choose.

Unusually for a PBS series it failed to say that Free to Choose was paid for by Pepsi Co, General Motors, Getty Oil, a military contractor called the Whittaker Corporation and 11 other American businesses. Also Readers Digest and various other conservative foundations, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation that would soon be campaigning for climate denial.

Friedman kept telling British producer Antony Jay (later famous for Yes, Minister) that ‘freedom yields greater abundance’.

Friedman wanted episode 1, about America being the land of the free for immigrants, simply to say that because of neoliberalism they were now, not better off exactly, but in some vague way, more free. Jay, however, had a TV series to make and had to find real things to point a camera at. You can’t film somebody being more free. So the episode ended up arguing, despite Friedman, who was supposed to be the writer with his economist wife, that immigrants had come to the States to escape poverty.

Hmmm. This would of course have been true whether the USA had a neoliberal economy or a Keynesian one.

'Think Tanks' - not finding real solutions to real economic challenges. This was about politics. It was about power

Sweden's top economist, Gunnar Myrdal (whose wife Alva Myrdal won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982) claimed that Milton Friedman’s fake Nobel prize in 1976 had been a fix

Friedman’s University of Chicago has won the fake Nobel prize more than any other

After the creation of the Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel past and present members of Fritz Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society were frequently turning up on the economics committee. As did members of Sweden’s neoliberal think tank, the Centre for Business and Policy Studies.

Meanwhile Sweden’s leading economist, Gunna Myrdal, a scholar of world standing, was unaccountably left out of the awarding committee.

In 1974 Gunnar Myrdal was forced to share the fake Nobel prize in economics with Fritz Hayek neoliberal author of The Road to Serfdom. Hayek believed any government intervention led to Nazism.

In 1976 Milton Friedman won it.

By 1979 four prominent freemarketeers had won it, and the balance shifted even more in the 1980s. In particular, in 1977 Myrdal claimed that Milton Friedman’s award the year before had been a fix.

READ: Alva and Gunnar Myrdal: Social Engineering in the Modern World by Thomas Etzemüller

In 1974, with Harold Wilson as PM, Tories Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher set up the Centre for Policy Studies; a right wing, free market think tank

'Think Tanks' - the name is something of a joke

By the end of the 1970s neoliberal look-alikes of Brit, Anthony Fisher's, 1955 Institute of Economic Affairs began to spread across the world: Paris, Peru, Iceland, Australia – 26 of them just by 1985. They began to be known as ‘think tanks’ which was something of a joke because, far from thinking, they were peddling the same message of neoliberalism, filling the newspapers and newsbulletins with it, getting it discussed in the Oval Office and in 10 Downing Street. Governments should cut spending, cut tax, cut regulations, set business free.

Before she became Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher even set up her own neoliberal think tank, along with fellow Tory Keith Joseph. It was called the Centre for Policy Studies.

What we’re discovering is that all the think tanks and second-hand scribblers turn out to be little more than a distraction, a myth, a flimsy veil covering a very hard-edged reality. What was really going on here was not thinking, winning arguments, finding real solutions to real economic challenges. This was about politics. It was about power.

#102 'The Cuckoo in the Nobel Nest'
Ep 2 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

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