Gunnar Myrdal

Swedish economist and politician

• Born: December 6, 1898
• Birthplace: Gustafs, Dalrna, Sweden
• Died: May 17, 1987
• Place of death: Stockholm, Sweden

Myrdal, who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is among the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He was one of the primary forces responsible for the development of the welfare state in his native Sweden, and his study of American racial relations contributed to the dismantling of legal segregation in the United States. His analyses of the poverty and problems of the developing world have been equally influential.

Early Life

Gunnar Myrdal (GUHN-uhr MEER-dahl) was the eldest of four children born to a farmer and a railroad employee and his wife. Myrdal, a brilliant and an ambitious student, attended Stockholm University, where he received a degree in law in 1923. Finding the practice of law in itself unsatisfactory, he returned to the university to study economics and received a doctorate in that discipline in 1927. His abilities being obvious, he was retained at the university after graduation, becoming first a lecturer and then, in 1931, a professor. In 1933, he became the Lars Hierta Professor of Political Economy at Stockholm, a position he held for many years.

In 1924, he married Alva Reimer, a fellow student at Stockholm University. Alva Reimer Myrdal had an equally distinguished academic and public career, and the Myrdals often worked together on various social and economic subjects. In 1934, they published Kris i befolkningsfr†gan (crisis in the population question), which analyzed the reasons for the low birthrate in their native Sweden. Their recommendations included government loans and subsidies to married couples to encourage them to have children, as well as the building of public housing and provisions for child care. Since they believed that children should be desired by their parents, however, they also urged the necessity of sex education and family planning. Soon the Myrdal name became famous, so famous that a home planned for large families was known as a Myrdal house, a long couch was a Myrdal sofa, and, used as a verb, the name became a slang term for the procreative act itself. The Myrdals eventually had three children.

Life’s Work

Although trained in economics and deeply interested in mathematical models and their application to economic issues, Myrdal early came to believe that too often pure economic theory ignored the more important cultural, historical, political, and societal influences. He became a leading advocate of the multidisciplinary and multicausational approach in the analysis of society, and he is considered to be a major proponent of the institutionalist school. A strong believer in stating his own value premises, Myrdal argued that it was impossible to approach any study without values and preconceptions and that it was thus necessary that the student or observer make those values and preconceptions explicit. Pretensions to simple empiricism or objectivity an impossibility to Myrdal could only result in chaos. Intellectually a child of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, Myrdal had great faith in human reason and rationality, and he believed that such reason must be used for the general improvement of society. Never simply an academic, Myrdal regularly served the Swedish government in various executive and legislative capacities and is considered one of the formative influences on the development of the welfare state in that country. During the worldwide economic depression of the 1930’s, Myrdal urged additional government spending to combat its effects, a position often popularly associated with the ideas of John Maynard Keynes.

Myrdal was a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1929, beginning a long, fruitful, and sometimes contentious relationship with the United States. He was a great admirer of PresidentsThomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and he spent much time in the United States. Myrdal approved of American idealism and openness, but he was not uncritical of various institutions and practices that he believed perverted those positive values. In 1938, he was chosen by the Carnegie Corporation to direct a study of the plight of blacks in the United States. The result was An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). It was a work that was not only an analysis of the black community but also a profound commentary on the conflict and tensions between the ideals of equality as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the discrimination that blacks suffered in American society. Myrdal was selected to lead the project in part because of his previous academic and political accomplishments, in part because, as an outsider, he had the appearance of being more objective; thus, the study’s findings would be more acceptable.

It was several years before the fourteen-hundred-page work was finally published, in 1944. Its appearance had been delayed by the outbreak of World War II, which prompted Myrdal to return to Sweden for a time. An American Dilemma was never a best seller. Its initial printing was only twenty-five hundred copies, yet it eventually went through more than thirty editions. More important, it was a major influence on the emerging Civil Rights movement, culminating in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education , which saw the United States Supreme Court ban segregation in public schools. In its unanimous decision, rendered in 1954, the Court specifically cited Myrdal’s work as supporting the argument that the separation of races was inherently unequal and much to the detriment of black students. When An American Dilemma first appeared, Myrdal expressed optimism regarding the future relations of the races in the United States. Because of the slow pace of integration and the intractable problems of economic deprivation, Myrdal later became more pessimistic regarding America’s dilemma.

Toward the end of World War II, Myrdal traveled throughout the United States as an economic adviser to the Swedish government. As did many other economists, Myrdal predicted the return of the Depression of the 1930’s once the war concluded. In his opinion, the depths of the new economic crisis would be compounded as a result of the lack of government planning in the United States. In 1945, Myrdal was appointed minister of commerce in the first postwar Swedish government. His great faith in planning and his reputation for seeking solutions in extensive government actions made his term as minister of commerce controversial. Also, Myrdal pursued a policy of increased trade with the Soviet Union, a move resented in some quarters, including the United States. Yet, as American idealism and self-interest led to the development of the Marshall Plan in 1947, trade with the Soviet Union became of less consequence, and Myrdal resigned from the Swedish cabinet, accepting instead a position in the United Nations as the secretary-general of the European Economic Commission. Here, too, however, the Cold War dogged Myrdal: Europe remained divided, and the commission proved to be of less consequence than he had hoped.

In 1953, Myrdal spent six weeks in Southeast Asia and was struck by the various economic problems in the region. Alva Myrdal, who also had worked for the United Nations, was appointed Sweden’s ambassador to India in 1955. Although husband and wife were often apart because of their separate careers, Myrdal was able to spend some time in India with Alva. His Asian visits led to a deep interest in the poverty endemic in Asia. In 1958, he published Rich Lands and Poor: The Road to World Prosperity . That work proved to be a preliminary study of poverty in the developing world, a study that culminated ten years later in a monumental three-volume, 2,300-page work entitled Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968), the subtitle suggesting a comparison with Adam Smith’s eighteenth century classic, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Like his earlier An American Dilemma, Asian Drama saw many years of gestation and the contributions of many scholars before its publication.

Consistent with his multicausational analysis of societies and their institutions, and expressing his belief in the need for Southeast Asia to modernize through rational planning and development, social discipline, and changed attitudes, Myrdal criticized earlier theories and programs that had posited that Asia could easily adopt and adapt to Western models of development. Although Myrdal urged more capital investment by the West, Asian Drama was more descriptive than prescriptive and caused its reviewers considerable difficulty. While all recognized its scope and its analytic significance, many claimed that Myrdal had become both discouraged and pessimistic. The magnitude of the problems was so profound a rapidly increasing population, inefficient agricultural and unsuitable educational systems, and the lack of effective governments to make the necessary changes that Myrdal seemed to be saying that little could be usefully done by the industrialized nations of the West in assisting the East. Others noted that Myrdal’s own stated values were perhaps too Western for the varied Asian cultural experience, and still others pointed out that Asian Drama failed to discuss the more encouraging experiences of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Nevertheless, the work was a milestone in its discussion of the problems of poverty that faced one-quarter of the earth’s population.

Although wealthy from his many writings, he continued a rather simple lifestyle until his death in Stockholm in 1987 at the age of eighty-eight.

Significance

Two years later, in The Challenge to World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline , published in 1970, Gunnar Myrdal returned to the subject matter of Asian Drama. Some modern observers of the developing world had expressed optimism over indications of increased food production through the introduction of new and hybrid crops and the possibility of population reduction through birth-control programs. Myrdal was not convinced and reiterated his demand for structural changes in the developing world: land and educational reform and attitudinal and social changes. The so-called Green Revolution and Western programs to limit births were, in his opinion, too ephemeral, too transient, and too superficial. Myrdal, with his multidisciplinary and multicausational approach, had long doubted the efficacy of simple solutions. He agreed with the Keynesians and their belief in deficit funding, but only during times of crisis. Over the long run and for more permanent solutions, structural changes in the economy and society were required, an argument he had earlier made in Challenge to Affluence , an analysis of the economy of the United States, published in 1963.

In the late 1960’s and the 1970’s, Myrdal pleaded publicly for massive increases in spending to solve the combined urban and poverty problems of the United States. The programs of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and its successors were simply inadequate. He hoped to revise and update An American Dilemma, expressing both optimism regarding American idealism and pessimism over the slow rate of change in solving the crucial problem of American racism. However, his major work was done. By 1975, his health had declined, although he continued to speak and lecture in the United States and Sweden for many years. In 1974, he shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with his antithesis, the conservative Austrian economistF. A. Hayek. Later Myrdal said that he should have rejected the award because economics was not a science, what with its many value judgments, a position he had maintained for many years.

Myrdal’s legacy is a rich and varied one. In the United States, perhaps his most enduring contribution is in the area of race relations. An American Dilemma not only influenced policymakers and fellow scholars but also, as Myrdal’s ideas were disseminated in textbooks and popular studies, helped to shape the attitudes of several generations of American students. Myrdal’s massively documented study of racial discrimination thus played a significant part in forcing American society to acknowledge a great injustice and begin to redress it.

Bibliography

Dykema, Eugene R. “No View Without a Viewpoint: Gunnar Myrdal.” World Development 14 (1986): 147-163. The author of this study of Myrdal’s intellectual approach discusses the latter’s belief in the importance of stating one’s values before attempting any analysis of social problems. Dykema, while sympathetic to Myrdal’s positions, also argues that Myrdal perhaps too often reflects the Western belief in human rationality, sometimes at the expense of differing value systems from other cultures.

Maddison, Angus, ed. Myrdal’s “Asian Drama”: An Interdisciplinary Critique. Liège, Belgium: Ciriec, 1971. This volume is a collection of articles devoted to Myrdal’s Asian Drama. Originally presented at a conference in Montreal, the papers reflect the diverse background of their authors, all of whom had varied responses to Myrdal’s long analysis of the many problems of Southeast Asian societies.

Myrdal, Gunnar. Against the Stream. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Myrdal never wrote his autobiography, arguing in the preface to this collection of articles that his life had focused more on the problems that interested him than on his experiences and on persons he knew. He stated that this volume should be read as a substitute for his memoirs.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Essential Gunnar Myrdal. Edited with commentary by Örjan Appelqvist and Stella Andersson, translated by Richard Litell, Sonia Wachmann, et al. New York: New Press, 2005. Includes a range of Myrdal’s writing, including essays on economics, the population explosion, the value of social sciences, and his study of Asian development.

Sherman, Howard. “Gunnar Myrdal: Economics as Social Relations.” Journal of Economic Issues 10 (June, 1976): 210-214. This article announced that Myrdal had received the Veblen-Commons Award. Sherman, a Marxist scholar, praises Myrdal for his critique of the neoclassical economists and his work on American racism but criticizes Myrdal for not making use of the concepts of class conflict and socialist revolution.

Walsh, Francis P. “The Most International Swede.” Contemporary Review 224 (March, 1974): 113-120. In this venerable British journal, the author, in the year that Myrdal received the Nobel Prize, summarizes, in an interesting and readable fashion, Myrdal’s long and varied career.