Gunnar Myrdal's Contribution to Economics, 1940-1970

In this article, the author reviews the analysis developed by Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) in his Monetary Equilibrium (1932, 1933, 1965). The author argues that Myrdal’s analysis of monetary rules based on interest rates is relevant for the current policy and pedagogy, not only because Myrdal offers a workable framework, but for his incorporation of the institutional context, usually ignored by other pedagogical strategies teaching monetary rules. Thus, this article is a prelude to a more complete approach to monetary policy analysis.

As two of the leading social scientists of the twentieth century, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal tried to establish a harmonious, “organic” Gemeinschaft [community] in order to fight an assumed disintegration of modern society. By means of functionalist architecture and by educating “sensible” citizens, disciplining bodies, and reorganizing social relationships they attempted to intervene in the lives of ordinary men. The paradox of this task was to modernize society in order to defend it against an “ambivalent modernity.” This combination of Weltanschauung [world view], social science, and technical devices became known as social engineering. The Myrdals started in the early 1930s with Sweden, and then chose the world as their working field. In 1938, Gunnar Myrdal was asked to solve the “negro problem” in the United States, and, in the 1970s, Alva Myrdal campaigned for the world's super powers to abolish all of their nuclear weapons. The Myrdals successfully established their own "modern American" marriage as a media image and role model for reform. Far from perfect, their marriage was disrupted by numerous conflicts, mirrored in thousands of private letters. This marital conflict propelled their urge for social reform by exposing the need for the elimination of irrational conflicts from everyday life. A just society, according to the Myrdals, would merge social expertise with everyday life, and ordinary men with the intellectually elite. Thomas Etzemüller's study of these two figures brings to light the roots of modern social engineering, providing insight for today's sociologists, historians, and political scholars.

This short article considers four questions about the lives led by Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal, world-famous Swedish social scientists. What were the social conditions for the development of their ideas? What implications (if any) did their developing social science theories have for their personal lives? Is consistency a necessary requirement in matching words and deeds? Is there any necessary relationship between the public and private lives of eminent scholars and public figures? All three of their children, Jan, Sissela, and Kaj, have written autobiographical accounts which, directly or indirectly, suggest that the Myrdal family was dysfunctional. The implications of this are explored.

Ethics and the Social Sciences. Edited by Leo R. Ward. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1959. Pp. xi, 127. $3.25.) - Value In Social Theory. Essays by Gunnar Myrdal, selected and edited by Paul Streeten. (New York: Harper & Brothers. 1959. Pp. xlvi, 269. $5.00.) - Volume 54 Issue 2

The economic progress of black Americans has captured the attention of economists and sociologists since Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma appeared in the early 1940s. More than half a century later, social scientists are still intrigued with the determinants of black economic status and how that status has changed over time. In 1989, the National Research Council published a major study entitled A Common Destiny: The Status of Black Americans, which served as a clear signal that interest in the economic progress of blacks was deeply entrenched in economic and sociological research. Even though there is considerable research on the economic progress of African Americans, there is no consensus regarding what factors best explain changes over time in the economic conditions of African Americans.1

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. —Karl Marx, Theses on Feurbach. The mark of an important contribution, whether in the hard or the social sciences, is not that it reveals some eternal truth. It is, rather, that existing knowledge and analysis are put together in new ways, raising questions and offering conclusions which allow and force friends and enemies alike to push their own research and analysis into different areas. —Doug Dowd, refering to C. Wright Mills. For social scientist it is a sobering and useful exercise in self-understanding to attempt to see clearly how the direction of our scientific exertions, particularly in economics, is conditioned by the society in which we live, and most directly by the political climate (which, in turn, is related to all other changes in society). Rarely if ever, has the development of economics by its own force blazed the way to new perspectives. The cue to the continual reorientation of our work has normally come from the sphere of politics. Responding to the cue, students turn to research on issues that have attained political importance … So it has always been. The major recasting of economic thought .... were all responses to changing political conditions and opportunities. —Gunnar Myrdal, in Asian Drama.

This paper directs itself to the impact of American social science on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal on the role of education and social science in “modern” industrial democracy. After a brief sketch of the Myrdals' role in the development of Swedish welfare reforms and of their intellectual contacts in the United States during the 1930's, the paper outlines four theoretical “dilemmas” of “modernity” to the solution of which education and social research was seen to contribute: the relationships between facts and values, the individual and the collective, child rearing and social change, and theory and practice. The paper concludes by tracing the articulation of these themes in the Social Democratic Party school reform proposals of 1948.

Dependence is dead, long live dependence and the class struggle: An answer to critics

Recent race riots offer powerful and disturbing images and evidence of the cost of ignoring the apparent unfairness of court decisions made by all white juries. In the eyes of many marginalized segments of the community, the conviction of a black defendant or acquittal of a white defendant by an all white jury, against overwhelming evidence of his guilt, is deeply disturbing. The fact that a jury is all white has the powerful effect of racializing the jury proceeding. In the post-Civil War south, a series of similar atrocities occurred when the Ku Klux Klan's frenzy of violence and lynching , targeting blacks and white Republicans, went unpunished by all white juries. It is notorious that practically never have white lynching mobs been brought to court in the South, even when the killers are known to all in the community and are mentioned in name in the local press, Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 work on race relations once declared.' Today, issues of racially mixed juries and racial balance in cases involving inter-racial crimes pose unique challenges to our judiciary, our criminal justice system, and the community. This article examines possible applications of affirmative action in jury selection to create racially heterogeneous juries. Since race-conscious affirmative action must rely on the clear conceptualization of race and racial definitions, the article first presents critical analysis of the conceptualization and formulation of race and racial classification. Specifically, the first section of this article attempts to deconstruct racial identity as defined by government-defined racial categories, suggesting that race is a social construction and racial identity is subject to individual and societal manipulation. This allows many individuals to pass as members of different racial groups. The article then empirically examines public perceptions of the affirmative jury structures, focusing on the use of mandatory racial quotas to engineer racially heterogeneous juries in criminal trials, specifically the jury de medietate linguae, the Hennepin model, the social science model, and a peremptory inclusive selection method. The article finally argues that, given the strong endorsement for the Hennepin and social science models of affirmative juries, both legislative and court-initiated actions may be needed to energize the public debate concerning the importance of racially mixed juries, the size of mandated racial quotas, and implications regarding applications of affirmative action in jury proceedings. t Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz. Ph.D. & M.A., University of California, Riverside, 1985 & 1982; B.A., California State University, Fullerton, 1979. 1 am very grateful to Ian F. Haney Lopez for his helpful comments on the social deconstruction of race as well as John Brown Childs, G William Domhoff, and Richard Krooth for their critical comments on the earlier version of this article. 1. GUNNAR MYRDAL, AMERICAN DILEMMA 552 (1944). 1 Fukurai: Social De-Construction of Race and Affirmative Action in Jury Sel Published by Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository, 1999

<i>Stephen Schryer</i> Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction<i>Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction</i>. Stephen Schryer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 278.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: DISARRAY AND DISCONTINUITIES OR RISE AND REASSESSMENT? It is often argued (by Brewer and deLeon, 1983, for instance) that an orientation to policy is a recent phenomenon in social science. As a scholarly enterprise it is often presented as an approach closely associated with Harold Lasswell's efforts to establish an intellectual underpinning for the systematic application of social science to the long-range needs of policy making (e.g., Lerner and Lasswell, 1951; Lasswell, 1970, 1971, and 1974). True enough, so the argument goes, there were other early proponents of policy orientation such as Yehezkel Dror or, more by way of research than of advocacy, Gunnar Myrdal. However, the fact remains that the concept of the social sciences as ‘policy sciences’ was, indeed, the work of a group of scholars gathered around Lasswell himself. Although earlier traditions such as that of American philosophical pragmatism or the work of the Chicago school of sociology in the interwar years did much to promote the trend towards a programmatic policy orientation in social science, this orientation as a conscious research programme is a phenomenon of the last three or four decades. It entailed ‘a fundamental change in outlook, orientation, methods, procedures, and attitude’ (Brewer and deLeon, 1983, p. 6).

The evolution of sociology and the social science subjects took many years by following social and traditional cultures and the contributions made but the several social reformers, sociologists, they tried to explore the new ideas, reforms for the social development of the states in the world, usually in the eastern world we can find the evidence of evolution of sociology ideas, thinking’s in the scientific way. The evolution of Sociology concepts and social science took many years and it was the initial stage in the development of scientific ideas, innovations, political science and the social-economy in the world. The evolution of sociology took its time by the contribution of various social thinkers like “Karl Marx, Max Webe, Émile Durkheim, Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Bruno, Gunnar Myrdal, Elsie Clews Parsons and Talcott Parson’s etc, their contributions was the significant step In the evolution of sociology. The research paper explains the evidences for the evolution of the sociology, as a part of social science, which explains the human development in the social thinking and the socio-political and socio economic development in the states. KEY WORDS: Sociology and its evolution, Scope of sociology, the role of sociology and Social science.

‘How scientific are the social sciences?’ was the title of a lecture given by Gunnar Myrdal at Harvard University in 1971.

This book takes a fresh look at significant figures in the history of the American social sciences. While the central figures of the book—W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Horace Cayton—have all been well studied, the strength of the present monograph is to place them in a narrative that foregrounds gender as an analytic category. Malinda Alaine Lindquist focuses on masculinity and traces how pioneering black social scientists portrayed the black “supermen” of the book's title in the first third of the twentieth century. By the final third of the twentieth century, social science had “devolved” to describing emasculated black men, most famously in the Moynihan Report. Lindquist builds her narrative by taking key figures of black social science, most notably Frazier and Cayton, and explaining how their research agendas were inverted by the 1960s. Lindquist documents, through a very close examination of the social scientific literature, how social scientific thought on black males was inverted as symptoms became causes and the originally posited causes became lost from view altogether. She follows the path cleared by Frazier's biographer, Anthony Platt, to show that Frazier was misunderstood by the previous generation of historians, who labeled him the father of the black pathological family. Lindquist argues that Frazier embraced the “masculinist paradigm” in order to uncover systematic white oppression of black families. In a similar vein, Cayton's writings, following Gunnar Myrdal, always pointed to systematic white violence as the real psychosis the nation needed to address.

"How Scientific Are the Social Sciences?." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 29(1), pp. 31–37 Additional informationNotes on contributorsGunnar Myrdal“… there can never be, and has never been, ‘disinterested’ research in the social field, as there can be in the natural sciences. Valuations are, in fact, determining our work even if we manage to be unaware of it. And this is true, however much the researcher is subjectively convinced that he is simply observing and recording facts.” Gunnar Myrdal is an economist at Stockholm University's Institute for International Economic Studies. His article is based on the first Gordon Alport Memorial Lecture presented at Harvard University in November 1971.