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Economic theory may be speculative, but its impact is powerful and real. Since the 1970s, it has been closely associated with a sweeping change around the world - the market turn. This is what Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg call the rise of market liberalism, a movement that, seeking to replace social democracy, holds up buying and selling as the norm for human relations and society. Our confidence in markets comes from economics, and our confidence in economics is underpinned by the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was first awarded in 1969. Was it a coincidence that the market turn and the prize began at the same time? The Nobel Factor, the first book to describe the origins and power of the most important prize in economics, explores this and related questions by examining the history of the prize, the history of economics since the prize began, and the simultaneous struggle between market liberals and social democrats in Sweden, Europe, and the United States.

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"I love this book. It´s beautifully written, but more importantly, it manages to combine a sociology of the Nobel Prize in Economics with a genealogy of market liberalism and a history of Swedens struggle over social democracy. This is difficult enough to imagine, let alone make work, and the authors should be applauded for doing so."--Mark Blyth, author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

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Avner Offer is Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the University of Oxford and a fellow of All Souls College and the British Academy. His books include The Challenge of Affluence. Gabriel Söderberg is a researcher in the Department of Economic History at Uppsala University in Sweden.

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