Gunnar Myrdal
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, published in 1944, stands as the central work of Gunnar Myrdal's career — a sociological and economic study of race relations in the United States.
Myrdal was born on December 6, 1898, in Skattunge Parish, Sweden. He received his education at Norra Real and subsequently at Stockholm University, and he went on to work as an economist, a sociologist, a politician, and a university teacher. A Swedish citizen who used both Swedish and English, he moved across disciplinary lines throughout his professional life, a range that is reflected in the variety of honors he eventually received.
The 1944 study brought him the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a prize given to writing that addresses racism and human diversity. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His other honors included the Fellowship of the Econometric Society, the Peace Prize of the German Publishers' and Booksellers' Association, the Kurt Lewin Award, the Bronislaw Malinowski Award, the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, and a doctor honoris causa from the University of Nancy — a collection that spans economics, sociology, and international affairs.
Myrdal died on May 17, 1987, in Danderyd, Sweden, at the age of eighty-eight. The Library of Congress records him as "Myrdal, Gunnar, 1898–1987," a designation that marks a life conducted across nearly nine decades, in two languages, and through several distinct fields of inquiry.
Quotes by Gunnar Myrdal
In the United States, and to only slightly lesser degree in all the other rich and economically progressive Western countries, public debate has at all times been dominated by the adherents of a “free” economy.
Education has in America’s whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.
There is apparently nowhere a workable majority in the representative assemblies for making the specific cuts in expenditure which could bring down the taxes, and in election after election the people vote into power representatives who are as unable as they are unwilling to do anything about it.
It Is in the Agricultural Sector That the Battle for Long- Term Economic Development Will Be Won or Lost.
The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well-off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery almost without noticing them.
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.
Planned parenthood" in the social history of the Western countries is, indeed, a phenomenon instrin-sically related to those very changes in peoples attitudes which, on the political plane, have been causing the trend towards economic planning.
Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.