Gunnar Myrdal
Encyclopedia
Karl Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 Nobel Laureate economist, sociologist, and politician. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, but officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel , is an award for outstanding contributions to the field of economics, generally regarded as one of the...

 with Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August Hayek CH , born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought...

 for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." He is best known in the United States for his study of race relations, which culminated in his book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. The study was influential in the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court Decision Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...

.

Childhood

Myrdal was born on 6 December 1898 in Gustafs, Sweden, to Karl Adolf Pettersson (1876–1934), a railroad employee, and his wife Anna Sofia Karlsson (1878–1965). He took the name Myrdal in 1914.

Education and early career

There is a possibly apocryphal story about an interaction between him and Gustav Cassel
Gustav Cassel
Karl Gustav Cassel was a Swedish economist and professor of economics at Stockholm University.Cassel's perspective on economic reality, and especially on the role of interest, was rooted in British neoclassicism and in the nascent Swedish schools...

, where Cassel was reported to say, "Gunnar, you should be more respectful to your elders, because it is we who will determine your promotion," and he replied, "Yes, but it is we who will write your obituaries."

Gunnar Myrdal graduated with a law degree from Stockholm University
Stockholm University
Stockholm University is a state university in Stockholm, Sweden. It has over 28,000 students at four faculties, making it one of the largest universities in Scandinavia. The institution is also frequently regarded as one of the top 100 universities in the world...

 in 1923 and a doctorate in economics in 1927. In 1919, he met Alva Reimer
Alva Myrdal
Alva Myrdal was a Swedish sociologist and politician. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She married Gunnar Myrdal in 1924....

, whom he married in 1924.

In Gunnar Myrdal's doctoral dissertation, published in 1927, he examined the role of expectations in price formation. His analysis strongly influenced the Stockholm school
Stockholm school (economics)
The Stockholm school, or Stockholmsskolan, is a school of economic thought whose antithesis is the gold standard centered Austrian School of Economics. It refers to a loosely organized group of Swedish economists that worked together, in Stockholm, Sweden primarily in the 1930s...

.

Between 1925 and 1929, he studied in Britain and Germany. He was a Rockefeller Fellow and visited the United States in 1929-1930. During this period, he published his first books, including The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory. Returning to Europe, he served for one year as Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of International Studies
Graduate Institute of International Studies
The Graduate Institute of International Studies, best known as HEI , was founded in 1927 as one of the first institutions in the world dedicated to the study of international relations...

, Geneva, Switzerland.

Gunnar Myrdal was at first fascinated by the abstract mathematical models coming into fashion in the 1920s and helped found the Econometric Society, based in London. Later, however, he accused the movement of ignoring the problem of distribution of wealth in its obsession with economic growth, of using faulty statistics and substituting Greek letters for missing data in its formulas and of flouting logic. He wrote, "Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces." Professor Myrdal was an early supporter of the theses of John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA , was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments...

, although he maintained that the basic idea of adjusting national budgets to slow or speed an economy was first developed by him and articulated in his book Monetary Economics, published in 1932, four years prior to Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
Gunnar Myrdal also developed the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multi-causal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated.

Career

He became a Social Democratic
Swedish Social Democratic Party
The Swedish Social Democratic Workers' Party, , contesting elections as 'the Workers' Party – the Social Democrats' , or sometimes referred to just as 'the Social Democrats' and most commonly as Sossarna ; is the oldest and largest political party in Sweden. The party was founded in 1889...

 Member of Parliament from 1933 and from 1945 to 1947 he served as Trade Minister in Tage Erlander
Tage Erlander
was a Swedish politician. He was the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and Prime Minister of Sweden from 1946 to 1969...

's government. During this period he was heavily criticised for his financial agreement with the Soviet Union. At the same time he was accused of being responsible for the Swedish monetary crisis in 1947.

He was professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics
Stockholm School of Economics
The Stockholm School of Economics or Handelshögskolan i Stockholm is one of Northern Europe's leading business schools. Its Masters in Management program is ranked no. 2 in Northern Europe and no. 13 in Europe by the Financial Times...

 from 1933 to 1947 while also a Member of Parliament.

He coauthored with his wife, Alva Myrdal
Alva Myrdal
Alva Myrdal was a Swedish sociologist and politician. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She married Gunnar Myrdal in 1924....

, the Crisis in the Population Question
Crisis in the Population Question
Crisis in the Population Question is a 1934 book by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. It discussed the declining birthrate in Sweden and proposed possible solutions...

. The work of Gunnar and Alva inspired policies adopted by the Minister of Social Affairs, Gustav Möller
Gustav Möller
Gustav Möller was a prominent Swedish Social democratic politician, credited as the father of the social security system and the Welfare state, called Folkhemmet...

, to provide social support to families.

Gunnar Myrdal headed a comprehensive study of sociological, economic, anthropological and legal data on race relations in the United States funded by the Carnegie Corporation, starting in 1938. The result of the effort was Gunnar Myrdal's best known work, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944, written with the collaboration of R. M. E. Sterner and Arnold Rose. He characterized the problem of race relations as a dilemma because of a perceived conflict between high ideals, embodied in what he called the "American Creed," on the one hand and poor performance on the other. In the generations since the Civil War, the U.S. had been unable to put its human rights ideals into practice for the African-American tenth of its population. This book was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

 in its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...

, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. Myrdal planned on doing a similar study on gender inequality, but he could not find funding for this project and never completed it.

During World War II, Gunnar Myrdal was staunchly, publicly anti-Nazi. Together with his wife, Alva
Alva Myrdal
Alva Myrdal was a Swedish sociologist and politician. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She married Gunnar Myrdal in 1924....

, he wrote Contact with America in 1941, which praised the United States' democratic institutions.

Gunnar Myrdal became the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe was established in 1947 to encourage economic cooperation among its member states. It is one of five regional commissions under the administrative direction of United Nations headquarters. It has 56 member states, and reports to the UN Economic and...

 in 1947. During his tenure, he founded one of the leading centers economic research and policy development. After ten years in the position, Dr. Myrdal resigned as Executive Secretary in 1957. In 1956 and 1957, he was able to publish An International Economy, Problems and Prospects, Rich Lands and Poor and Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions. Myrdal was also a signatory of the 1950 UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

 statement The Race Question
The Race Question
The Race Question is the first of four UNESCO statements about issues of race. It was issued on 18 July 1950 following World War II and Nazi racism. The statement was an attempt to clarify what was scientifically known about race and a moral condemnation of racism...

, which rebuts the theories of racial supremacy and purity, and also influenced the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Between 1960 and 1967, he was a professor of international economics at Stockholm University
Stockholm University
Stockholm University is a state university in Stockholm, Sweden. It has over 28,000 students at four faculties, making it one of the largest universities in Scandinavia. The institution is also frequently regarded as one of the top 100 universities in the world...

. In 1961, he founded the Institute for International Economic Studies
Institute for International Economic Studies
The Institute for International Economic Studies is a Swedish research institute at Stockholm University, founded in the early 1960s. The main objective is to produce outstanding research for publication in leading international journals...

 at the University. Throughout the 1960s, he worked on a comprehensive study of trends and policies in South Asia for the Twentieth Century Fund. The study culminated in his three-volume Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968. In 1970, he published a companion book called The Challenge of World Poverty, where he laid out what he believed to be the chief policy solutions to the problems he outlined in Asian Drama.

Gunnar Myrdal strongly opposed the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

. In Asian Drama, Myrdal predicted that land reform and pacification would fail in Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

 and urged the United States to begin negotiations with North Vietnam
North Vietnam
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam , was a communist state that ruled the northern half of Vietnam from 1954 until 1976 following the Geneva Conference and laid claim to all of Vietnam from 1945 to 1954 during the First Indochina War, during which they controlled pockets of territory throughout...

. After returning to Sweden, he headed the Swedish Vietnam Committee and became co-chair of International Commission of Inquiry Into U.S. War Crimes in Indochina. He also presided over the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an international watch-dog for the arms trade.

He shared the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (otherwise known as the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics) with Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August Hayek CH , born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought...

 in 1974 but argued for its abolition because it had been given to such "reactionaries" as Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August Hayek CH , born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought...

 and Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was an American economist, statistician, academic, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades...

.

Personal life

Myrdal was married to politician and diplomat Alva Myrdal
Alva Myrdal
Alva Myrdal was a Swedish sociologist and politician. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She married Gunnar Myrdal in 1924....

 in 1924, and together had two daughters, Kaj Fölster (mother of Stefan Fölster) and Sissela Bok
Sissela Bok
Sissela Bok, born 2 December 1934, is a Swedish-born philosopher and ethicist, the daughter of two Nobel Prize winners: Gunnar Myrdal who won the Economics prize with Friedrich Hayek in 1974, and Alva Myrdal who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982....

, and a son, Jan Myrdal
Jan Myrdal
Jan Myrdal is a Swedish author, leftist-political writer and columnist. He is an honorary doctor of literature at Upsala College in New Jersey, USA, and a Ph.D. at Nankai University in Tianjin in China. He has lived at various times in the United States, Afghanistan, Iran and India...

.

Myrdal was hospitalized for two months before he died in a hospital in Danderyd, near Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

, on May 17, 1987. His daughter Kaj Folster and his grandson, Janken Myrdal, were present.

Contributions to the philosophy of knowledge

Gunnar Myrdal's scientific influence was not limited to economics. Through the introduction to "Asian Drama" with the title "The Beam in our Eyes" (a biblical reference; cf. Matthew 7:1–2) he introduced the approach mentioned as scientific relativism of values. This behavioral approach is narrowly connected to behavioralism
Behavioralism
Behavioralism is an approach in political science which seeks to provide an objective, quantified approach to explaining and predicting political behavior. It is associated with the rise of the behavioral sciences, modeled after the natural sciences...

 and is built on the idea that the logical gulf between "is" and "ought" is more sophisticated than just dividing premises into categories. The articles edited in "Value in Social Theory" underlines Myrdal's importance to political science. As political science normally is considered more descriptive as economics one might get the idea that Myrdal should not have dealt systematically with the values applied to economics. On the contrary, Myrdal connected social science, political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

 and economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...

 as a practitioner.

Myrdal published many notable works, both before and after American Dilemma and, among many other contributions to social and public policy, founded and chaired the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Internationally revered as a father-figure of social policy
Social policy
Social policy primarily refers to guidelines, principles, legislation and activities that affect the living conditions conducive to human welfare. Thus, social policy is that part of public policy that has to do with social issues...

, he contributed to social democratic thinking throughout the world, in collaboration with friends and colleagues in the political and academic arenas. Sweden and Britain were among the pioneers of a welfare state
Welfare state
A welfare state is a "concept of government in which the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those...

 and books by Myrdal (Beyond the Welfare State - New Haven, 1958) and Richard Titmuss
Richard Titmuss
Richard Morris Titmuss was a pioneering British social researcher and teacher. He founded the academic discipline of Social Administration and held the founding chair in the subject at the London School of Economics.His books and articles of the 1950s helped to define the characteristics of...

 (Essays on “The Welfare State” - London, 1958) unsurprisingly explore similar themes. Myrdal's theoretical key concept "circular cumulative causation" contributed to the development of modern Non-equilibrium economics
Non-equilibrium economics
Non-equilibrium economics deals with processes that exhibit self-reinforcing causation, as opposed to standard neoclassical equilibrium economics. This approach is represented by modern researchers in the fields of evolutionary-institutional economics, Post Keynesian economics, Ecological...

.

Quotes by Gunnar Myrdal

"Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society."

"Education means an assimilation of white American culture. It decreases the dissimilarity of the Negroes from other Americans."

“The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery without almost noticing them.”

“In a time of deepening crisis in the underdeveloped world, of social malaise in the affluent societies . . it seems likely that Gandhi's ideas and techniques will become increasingly relevant.”

"The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes ... in drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes, we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture."

"White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ‘cause’ each other." (An American Dilemma)

"Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces."

“It is in the agricultural sector that the battle for long-term economic development will be won or lost.”

See also

  • Bronislaw Malinowski Award
    Bronislaw Malinowski Award
    The Bronislaw Malinowski Award is an award given by the US-based Society for Applied Anthropology in honor of Bronisław Malinowski , an original member and strong supporter of the Society...

  • Institute for International Economic Studies
    Institute for International Economic Studies
    The Institute for International Economic Studies is a Swedish research institute at Stockholm University, founded in the early 1960s. The main objective is to produce outstanding research for publication in leading international journals...

  • Social Democracy
    Social democracy
    Social democracy is a political ideology of the center-left on the political spectrum. Social democracy is officially a form of evolutionary reformist socialism. It supports class collaboration as the course to achieve socialism...

  • Stockholm school (economics)
    Stockholm school (economics)
    The Stockholm school, or Stockholmsskolan, is a school of economic thought whose antithesis is the gold standard centered Austrian School of Economics. It refers to a loosely organized group of Swedish economists that worked together, in Stockholm, Sweden primarily in the 1930s...

  • Stockholm School of Economics
    Stockholm School of Economics
    The Stockholm School of Economics or Handelshögskolan i Stockholm is one of Northern Europe's leading business schools. Its Masters in Management program is ranked no. 2 in Northern Europe and no. 13 in Europe by the Financial Times...


Publications

  • The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory. (1930)
  • The Cost of Living in Sweden, 1830-1930 (1933)
  • Crisis in the Population Question
    Crisis in the Population Question
    Crisis in the Population Question is a 1934 book by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. It discussed the declining birthrate in Sweden and proposed possible solutions...

    (1934)
  • Fiscal Policy in the Business Cycle. The American Economic Review, vol 21, no 1, Mar 1939.
  • Population, a Problem for Democracy. Harvard University Press, 1940.
  • Contact With America (1941)
  • An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Harper & Bros, 1944.
  • Social Trends in America and Strategic Approaches to the Negro Problem. Phylon, Vol. 9, No. 3, 3rd Quarter, 1948.
  • Conference of the British Sociological Association, 1953. II Opening Address: The Relation between Social Theory and Social Policy The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 4, No. 3, Sept. 1953.
  • An International Economy, Problems and Prospects. Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1956.
  • Rich Lands and Poor. 1957.
  • Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions, Gerald Duckworth, 1957.
  • Value in Social Theory: A Selection of Essays on Methodology. Ed. Paul Streeten, published by Harper, 1958.
  • Beyond the Welfare State. Yale University Press, 1960.
  • Challenge to Affluence. Random House, 1963.
  • America and Vietnam – Transition, No. 3, Oct, 1967.
  • Twenty Years of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. International Organization, Vol 22, No. 3, Summer, 1968.
  • Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations.
  • Objectivity in Social Research, 1969.
  • The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline. 1970.
  • Against the Stream.
  • Gunnar Myrdal on Population Policy in the Underdeveloped World – Population and Development Review, Vol 13, No. 3, Sept. 1987.
  • The Equality Issue in World Development - The American Economic Review, vol 79, no 6, Dec 1989.

External links

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