According to Offer and Söderberg, the Nobel Prize in Economics favors the former doctrine to the almost complete exclusion of the latter; only one laureate who has focused mainly on social democracy has won (Gunnar Myrdal, in 1974). Though both liberal and conservative economists have received the prize, the award has continually reinforced the primacy of the free market.

I spoke with Offer about these trends and what he considers some of the more notable awards and oversights. The interview that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Jeremy Venook: Near the end of your book, you pose a question: Is the Nobel Prize in Economics more similar to the one for Physics or the one for Literature? What do you see as the ramifications of that question?

Avner Offer: I think the implication of this question is that economics does not have any form of knowledge that enjoys superior authority over other modes of discourse. It does not mean that its arguments are invalid. In a world of imperfect understanding and imperfect knowledge, economics musters a set of arguments which have a certain persuasive value, but there are other types of arguments. I think that in the absence of an agreement about what the objectives of policy should be, what we know about the real world, and how to achieve these objectives, we should listen to economists, but we should not pay them any greater respect than to other people who are making valid arguments from other premises.

In practice, we do that much of the time. We don't let economists run our society, although what central bankers are doing right now is coming dangerously close to that. I think we should listen to economists with respect. They are smart people, they have good arguments, but they don't have decisive arguments. In that respect, it's more like literature than like physics: When physicists agree, laypeople are in no position to contradict them, no position to argue. That's not the case with economists.

Venook: For the first few decades after the award was established, conservative and liberal economists both won the prize, but in the 1990s there was a shift in the awarding of the Nobel Prize to people who were of an economically conservative ideology. Could you elaborate a little bit on how that trend came to be?

Offer: We tried to designate [winners] to either on the left or the right, and what characterizes the policy is an almost mechanical balance: The liberal and conservative appointees alternate with each other. Then, from 1989 to 1997, there's an unbroken run of conservative winners. That coincides, and perhaps not accidentally, with an accentuation of political conflict in Sweden itself. The chairman of the Nobel Prize committee was himself deeply involved in Swedish politics. He'd begun as a social democrat, he'd moved to the other side, and he was arguing very strongly that the social-democratic policy of workers' rights, unionization, and so on was inimical to prosperity. This might be considered as an indirect intervention in Swedish politics.