Karl Gunnar Myrdal ( MUR-dahl, MEER-; Swedish: [ˈɡɵ̌nːar ˈmy̌ːɖɑːl]; 6 December 1898 – 17 May 1987) was a Swedish economist and sociologist. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with Friedrich Hayek 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." When his wife, Alva Myrdal, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982, they became the fourth ever married couple to have won Nobel Prizes, and the first and only to win independent of each other (versus a shared Nobel Prize by scientist spouses). Myrdal is best known in the United States for his study of race relations, which culminated in his 1944 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. In Sweden, his work and political influence were important to the establishment of the Folkhemmet and the welfare state.
Early life and education Myrdal was born on 6 December 1898, in Skattungbyn, Sweden, to Karl Adolf Pettersson (1876–1934), a building contractor, and his wife Anna Sofia Karlsson (1878–1965). He took the name Myrdal in 1914 after his ancestors' farm Myr in the province of Dalarna. There is a possibly apocryphal story about an interaction between him and Gustav Cassel, 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 in 1923 and a doctorate in economics in 1927. In June 1919, he met Alva Reimer, whom he married in October 1924 and had the first of their three children in 1927. Myrdal's PhD thesis, The Problem of Price Formation under Economic Change, had three parts: The Basics of the Dynamic Problem of Price Formation, The Problem of the Profit of the Enterprise, and The Optimal Mode of Construction and Change, the most mathematical of the three, where he studied equilibrium of price formation under dynamic conditions. 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. He built on Knut Wicksell's theories of cumulative process of endogenous money, stressing the importance of Knightian uncertainty and ex ante and ex post expectations role in the economic process.
Early career Between 1925 and 1929, Myrdal 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 in 1930. Returning to Europe, he served for one year as associate professor in the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. The Political Element is a compilation of Myrdal's lectures presented at the University of Stockholm. It gives us the historical account of the influence of politics in the development of economic theory and the relation between them. Gunnar believed that economics would be considered a true science only when the political aspect was dissociated. It was initially written to criticize the older generation of Swedish economists such as Eli Heckscher, Gustav Cassel, and Brisman, for combining and confusing facts and values in their theories of 'maximum welfare', 'price level', and 'national income'. But later it turned out be a general critique of the economic theory where he emphasized that economics should be objective and independent from values. He wrote that although economists claim to be scientific and objective, their conclusion from their analyses was always politically inclined. The Political Element was translated to German in 1932 and to English in 1953. Gunnar Myrdal was at first fascinated by the abstract mathematical models coming into fashion in the 1920s, and helped found the Econometric Society 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, 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. William Barber's comment upon Myrdal's work on monetary theory goes like this:
If his contribution had been available to readers of English before 1936, it is interesting to speculate whether the 'revolution' in macroeconomic theory of the depression decade would be referred to as 'Myrdalian' as much as 'Keynesian'. Economist G. L. S. Shackle claimed the importance of Gunnar Myrdal's analysis by which saving and investment are allowed to adjust ex ante to each other. However, the reference to ex ante and ex post analysis has become so usual in modern macroeconomics that the position of Keynes to not include it in his work was currently considered as an oddity, if not a mistake. As Shackle put it:
Myrdalian ex ante language would have saved the General Theory from describing the flow of investment and the flow of saving as identically, tautologically equal, and within the same discourse, treating their equality as a condition which may, or not, be fulfilled. Gunnar Myrdal also developed the key concept circular cumulative causation, a multi-causal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated.
Academic career
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
