Open Democracy has a short essay on the power of association and the conversion of real capital into social capital.
Basically it tells the story of how the Bank of Sweden created the Bank of Sweden Prize for Economics in honor of Alfred Nobel in 1968 and used the power of Nobel’s name and the history of all the earlier words to legitimize economics as a scientific endeavor. It’s guilt by association in reverse and it worked incredibly well. Nowadays everyone just assumes that there is a Nobel prize for economics.
