The Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies proudly presents the first panel in the “Social Democracy Suppressed” series. The panel will be moderated by Jeff Madrick.

Panelists will respond to Avner Offer’s new book The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn (co-authored with Gabriel Soderberg, published by Princeton University Press in 2016). The Nobel Factor tells how the prize, created by the Swedish central bank, emerged from a conflict between central bank orthodoxy and social democracy. The aim was to use the halo of the Nobel brand to enhance central bank authority and the prestige of market-friendly economics, in order to influence the future of Sweden and the rest of the developed world. And this strategy has worked, with sometimes disastrous results for societies striving to cope with the requirements of economic theory and deregulated markets. Drawing on previously untapped Swedish national bank archives and providing a unique analysis of the sway of prizewinners, The Nobel Factor offers an unprecedented account of the real-world consequences of economics—and its greatest prize.

About the speakers:

  • Avner Offer is Chichele Professor of Economic History at All Soul’s College, University of Oxford.
  • Sheri Berman is Professor of Political Science at Barnard and the author of The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
  • Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and the Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the editor with Erinc Yeldan of Beyond Inflation Targeting: Monetary Policy For Employment Generation and Poverty Reduction (E. Elgar Press, 2010).
  • Darrick Hamilton is the director of the doctoral program in public and urban policy, and jointly appointed as an associate professor of economics and urban policy at The Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research. He is also a faculty research fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School and the president-elect of the National Economic Association.
  • Jeff Madrick is the director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative and a fellow at The Century Foundation. He is the editor of Challenge Magazine and the author, most recently, of Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School with support from the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at The Century Foundation.