Dr. Gunnar Myrdal — Profile, Specialty, Credentials & Public Visibility

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

A Swedish economist whose 1944 dissection of American racial caste became evidence in the Supreme Court case that ended legal school segregation — and whose wife won a separate Nobel Prize three decades after his.

Biography

About

Gunnar Myrdal was born in Sweden on 6 December 1898 and built a career studying how economics, institutions, and social forces knot together. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Friedrich Hayek for work on money theory and economic fluctuations. A decade earlier, he had published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a 1944 study of race relations that the Supreme Court cited in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 ruling that dismantled legal segregation in schools. Back home, his ideas shaped Sweden's Folkhemmet — the "people's home" w…

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In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Gunnar Myrdal

Gunnar Myrdal

said1984

Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.

— Myrdal (1984), quoted in: Revue internationale de pédagogie expérimentale, Vol. 22-23. H. Dunantlaan 1. (1985), p. 367

Gunnar Myrdal

said1982

America, compared to every other country in Western Civilization, large or small, has the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals in reference to human interrelations.

— p. 3, reported in O. W. Markley and Willis W. Harman (eds.) Changing Images of Man (Pergamon Press, 1982) ch. 2, p. 35

Gunnar Myrdal

said1951

The term 'economic planning' and perhaps still more bluntly 'planned economy' contains a tautology...

— G. Myrdal (1951), "The Trend Towards Economic Planning." The Manchester School, 19: 1–42.

Gunnar Myrdal

said1944

America has had gifted conservative statesmen and national leaders. But with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes.

— p. 7

Gunnar Myrdal

said1944

White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice.

— p. 75

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