links for 2007-11-08

• A Phony Social Security Debate - Joe Conason
• The Role of Central Banks in Credit Markets - Lacker - FRB Richmond
• Europe’s superstar firms - Vox EU
• Unmasking American Legend D.B. Cooper - New York Magazine
• Conservative authors: "Help, we're being oppressed!" - Salon.com
• Falafel! - Paul Krugman Blog
• On Rocket Science - Lockhart - FRB Atlanta
• Too old to work, too young to retire? - Vox EU

Comments

[anne]

Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, won a Nobel Prize, following Alva Myrdal who had already won the Peace Prize. Myrdal was an immeiate follower of Keynes and influential enough to have led the quickest recovery from the Depression of any developed nation. Also, Myrdal was among the foremost students of race an influential enough to be directly cited by the Supreme Court in deciding Brown v Board of Education.

Is Myrdal given any notice today among economists, especially so since Sweden though derided and even vilified by conservatives for decades has to be among the foremost economic successes, significantly due to the policy influence of Myrdal?

[anne]

No; Alva Myrdal, of course, won the Nobel Prize after Gunnar. Alva followed Gunnar.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE5D7133EF93BA25756C0A961948260

May 18, 1987

Gunnar Myrdal, Analyst of Race Crisis
By NEW YORK TIMES

Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist and sociologist whose 1944 book, ''An American Dilemma,'' helped to destroy the ''separate but equal'' racial policy in the United States, died yesterday in a hospital in Sweden. He was 88 years old.

Reports from the Swedish capital said he had been hospitalized for more than two months. At his bedside were his daughter Kaj Folster and a grandson, Janken Myrdal, who said Mr. Myrdal had ''died naturally of old age.''

Mr. Myrdal, the 1974 Nobelist in economics, was the widower of Alva Myrdal, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 for her efforts to promote world disarmament. She died in 1986.

A Footnote to History

Mr. Myrdal has been called the leading economist and social scientist of his epoch. Statesman, reformer, dissenter, pacifist and foe of inequality, an architect of the Swedish welfare state, he literally left his mark in a footnote to history - the famous footnote 11 to the United States Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Listing sources to prove that schools could not be ''separate but equal'' because separation implied and enforced inferiority, the Court said, ''See generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma 5/81944).''

The work appeared in two massive volumes in 1944, in an edition of only 2,500 copies; there have been about 30 editions since, but all have been small, with sales totaling 100,000. Nonetheless, the work has often been compared with Toqueville in its importance as a study of the United States.

''An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy'' was, Mr. Myrdal once said, ''not a study of the Negroes but of the American society from the viewpoint of the most disadvantaged group.'' The predicament, he wrote, was the conflict between the ideals that white Americans proclaimed and their betrayal in daily life. He held that this was particularly true in the South, where, he argued, discrimination was due less to bias than to a failure of the courts and the police to enforce the Constitution.

Though segregationists protested that the Court had fallen under the influence of a radical foreigner, the Myrdal study was highly optimistic about America's ability to solve its racial problem - over-optimistic, as Mr. Myrdal would acknowledge. The study was infused with admiration for this country, which he called his second home. He had no doubt that the conflict between American idealism and the reality of racism would be resolved in a reasonable time. ''No social utopia can compete with the promise of the American Constitution and with the American creed which it embodies,'' he wrote.

Above his desk in Stockholm hung two framed documents, the Declaration of Independence and a citation from Lincoln: ''To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.''

Explaining his views, an American friend, the economist Paul A. Samuelson, said, ''He's always lecturing us like a Dutch uncle because he loves us.'' Mr. Myrdal, talking with a reporter in 1972 about his long campaign against the Vietnam War, remarked, ''I don't say it's a pleasure, but for my conscience I could not say no.''

''I've always been optimistic about America,'' he continued. ''Why? Why do I sit here when I could spend my time with wine and girls? Because ideals mean something. They mean something special in America.''

Left Deep Mark on Homeland

He also left his mark on Sweden, where he helped draft many social and economic programs, and to a smaller extent on South Asia, where he vigorously preached land reform. Furthermore, as a United Nations official he promoted East-West detente before it became fashionable, and as an economist he criticized orthodox patterns of thinking and pioneered new ones.

Born on Dec. 6, 1898, in the rural parish of Gustafs, in central Sweden, the son of Karl Adolf Myrdal, a railroad employee, he was christened Karl Gunnar but eventually dropped the first name. He studied law and then economics at Stockholm University, so impressing his teachers that on graduation he was named to the faculty.

He was also a brash young man, as later he was called a brash old man. The story was told that Gustav Cassell, the great Swedish economist, warned him, ''Gunnar, you should be more respectful to your elders, because it is we who will determine your promotion.'' ''Yes,'' the young man is said to have replied, ''but it is we who will write your obituaries.''

In 1924 Mr. Myrdal married a fellow student, Alva Reimer, who became a leading feminist, pacifist and diplomat....

[anne]

Sissela Bok, the ethicist, is a daughter of the Myrdals, and wife of Derek Bok, Harvard's President.

[anne]

I was reading Sissela on ethics, and realized she had written on what Paul Krugman has been mocked for the "Rambo effect" on our sense of ethics. Then, I thought of Myrdal who became a hero to me when I was very young and visited Sweden and was told stories of the Myrdals.

[anne]

http://nobelprize.org/cgi-bin/print?from=%2Fnobel_prizes%2Feconomics%2Flaureates%2F1974%2Fmyrdal-lecture.html

March 17, 1975

The Equality Issue in World Development
By Gunnar Myrdal

My first impulse, when brooding over what topic I should choose for this lecture, was that I should turn toward some specific problem, selected from the field where I am at present working. But then I felt that more appropriate for this very special occasion would be that I should talk in more sweeping terms about a broader problem, and I chose the equality issue in world development. I shall dwell upon the economic, financial, social, psychological and political conditioning of our thinking about that issue, which is at bottom, a moral issue.

Our knowledge, as well as our ignorance, at any time and on every issue, tends to be opportunistically conditioned, and thus brought to deviate from full truth. In every epoch and every problem, this opportunistic tendency operates also in our scientific work, if not critically scrutinized. This view dawned upon me more than forty years ago, when I analyzed the political element in the development of economic theory. I have then over the years found this hypothesis confirmed by my studies in many different fields and, of course, during my ten years as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, responsible for operational work in relations with governments, as well as for research.

I
When I am now working on a study of the broad social and economic dynamics of race relations in the United States since the time, more than thirty years ago, when I wrote An American Dilemma, it has struck me how different the whole outlook on the world could be during the late Roosevelt era, compared with now. In most respects the world issues seemed to be, and in a sense were then, simpler, much less complex.

Leaving all other differences aside, what then was referred to by the static term the "backward regions" were held at rest, within the colonial power structure. Their continued economic stagnation in great poverty was taken for granted, without exerting much interest on the part of the public in the rich countries, nor among their economic scientists.

Perhaps the most important effect of World War II was the rapid dissolution of that power structure - although not having been part of the war aims of any belligerent country and not expected anywhere. Beginning with the quasivoluntary decolonization of the British dependencies on the Indian subcontinent and the rest of South Asia, it swept over the globe like a hurricane, reaching also regions where there had been virtually no indigenous liberation movement foreboding and, in some measure, preparing for the change. The result was the coming into existence in a rapid sequence of a great number of new, politically independent countries, which all were very poor and mostly stagnant, economically and socially, but where the educated elite, who thought and acted on their behalf, now raised the demand for development.

In turn, as a subsequent effect of that political change the general public in the Western countries were suddenly forced to become aware of the huge income gap as between the poor majority of mankind and the rich minority, as well as the further fact that this income gap is continually widening, as indeed it had been doing for more than a century. An isolating wall of inattention, and an ignorance made possible by that opportunistic bent of mind, had been broken through.

The poverty of what now came to be known as "underdeveloped countries", a dynamic term, became recognized to be a problem. This represented a momentous redirection of public interest. Within this movement there went also an equally radical redirection of economic research, for the first time giving importance to these countries' abject poverty and also to the policy methods, which could initiate progress there by planning for development.

This new awareness of the poverty in underdeveloped countries was bound to be morally disturbing in the Western world, where, particularly since Enlightenment, the ideal of greater equality has had an honored place in social philosophy. In economic science it had even been "proven" and placed at the basis of economic theory. The influence on practical policy of that recognized ideal had been minor, however, until towards the end of the last century economic conditions and power relations in one Western country after another began to make possible gradually to turn them into "welfare states." This process also implied greater awareness of existing inequalities.

From the beginning we find also that among the new policy proposals of economists aimed at instigating development in the underdeveloped countries, besides the prescriptions for economic planning, there was included a demand for economic assistance from the developed countries. In fact, much of the writings of economists in that early stage of the postwar era, as in many cases even later, became focused upon urging the politicians and the general public in the developed countries to be prepared to come forward with technical assistance, capital aid, and commercial concessions.

This was a new element in Western thinking. Until then, the colonial power system had served as a protective shield for consciences in Western developed countries. There anyhow existed no political basis for sensing any degree of collective international responsibility for what happened in the colonial dependiencies of some West European countries, for instance no surge for a discussion in the League of Nations about how to help them to develop.

And the otherwise highly idealistic charter of the United Nations, drawn up before the end of World War II, had little to say about the right to political independence for the peoples in the "backward regions." The Charter was still less outspoken about how to spur and aid development in the underdeveloped countries that would come to emerge.

But almost from the beginning, the United Nations and its specialized agencies became now the sounding boards for demands, raised by the representatives of the underdeveloped countries, for aid from, and commercial considerations of the developed countries. During the three decades of its existence, the effectiveness of the United Nations has, on the whole, tended to decrease, particularly in the field of peace and security and, more generally, all issues in which the developed countries feel they have important stakes. But this whole system of intergovernmental organizations has more and more become agencies for discussing, analyzing, and promoting development in underdeveloped countries. Their secretariats produce statistics and studies aimed at ascertaining, analyzing, demonstrating, and publicizing the pertinent elements of their poverty and the possible means of lifting them out of it. This is part of the process through which a compelling awareness of their plight has been engendered in the postwar period and forced itself upon every alert person....