Gunnar Myrdal and His Works

The readers of Gunnar Myrdal and His Works are getting two books in one. Part I deals with the biography of our subject and his contribution to social democracy, the "Swedish model," the famous (or notorious) "third way," to amelioration of the race problem in the USA, and to development in Southeast Asia, and the world over. Part Il illuminates Myrdal the economic theorist, his transit to institutionalism, and his enduring concern for the methods of social science... but there is biography and charming anecdote in both. Above all, Gunnar Myrdal's life and work represents a human and humane reaction to the austerity of unmitigated market forces in areas where they do not belong and are inherently ineffective. Born in 1898, his own experience in an impoverished Sweden and depressed America lent validity to his conclusion: "A social order that ... cannot afford to give children enough food, sanitary and spacious accommodation, satisfactory health care and education, and at the same time lacks employment for a great part of its labour force - that social order is unreasonable, and immoral and is already condemned by its own admission." Myrdal was acutely aware that "the advanced democratic [welfare] state has its perils (the dulling of civic alertness, arising from the very success of State intervention, and inflation), but there is no help for that, as he saw it, but more democracy, more education, more participation and more equality as measures to overcome them" (Francine Lalonde).