Gunnar Myrdal

Swedish · 1898 to 1987

Gunnar Myrdal was born on December 6, 1898, in the farming village of Skattungbyn in the Swedish province of Dalarna, the son of a builder. He trained first for the law before turning to economics at Stockholm University, where he earned his doctorate in 1927 and became a leading voice of what would be called the Stockholm School, the Swedish counterpart to Keynesian economics. In 1924 he married Alva Reimer, a psychologist and reformer who would become his lifelong intellectual partner and, decades later, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate in her own right. In 1938 the Carnegie Corporation of New York, searching for a scholar with no stake in America's racial history, commissioned Myrdal, a Swede who had never lived through Jim Crow, to lead a comprehensive study of the condition of Black Americans. He assembled a research team of more than seventy scholars, including a young Ralph Bunche, and spent six years producing An American Dilemma (1944), a work that reframed segregation as a moral contradiction at the heart of American democracy rather than a peripheral regional problem. He went on to serve as Sweden's Minister of Commerce from 1945 to 1947 and as executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, before turning his attention to the economics of poverty in Asian Drama (1968), his study of underdevelopment in South Asia. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Friedrich Hayek, an award whose politics sat uneasily with him; he later argued publicly that the prize itself should be discontinued. He remained an outspoken social democrat and a prolific writer into old age, continuing to publish and lecture even as Parkinson's disease slowly overtook him. He died on May 17, 1987, near Stockholm, at the age of eighty-eight.