Benny Carlson

The road to a Nobel Prize is usually long and winding. This article tracks the
road to Robert Fogel’s and Douglass North’s shared prize in economics in 1993
through Lennart Jörberg’s correspondence from 1965 to 1989. Jörberg, for almost
twenty years professor and head of the Department of Economic History at Lund
University, had during two year-long visits in the United States in the 1950s and
1960s developed relations with several economists and economic historians and
got a taste for ”new economic history” (cliometrics). In 1980, he was asked by the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to evaluate the work of Douglass North. An
interaction between Jörberg in Lund, Bo Gustafsson, professor in Uppsala, and Fogel and North in the US culminated in several guest lectures in Sweden by Fogel and North in 1989. When Fogel and North, after they had been evaluated in additional reports, received the prize in economics four years later, Jörberg was co-opted to the Academy’s price committee.