GUNNAR MYRDAL, WON NOBEL PRIZE, WROTE ABOUT POOR IN AMERICA;
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Author: Associated Press
Date: Monday, May 18, 1987
Page: 49
Section: OBITUARY
STOCKHOLM -- Gunnar Myrdal, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who used
his background in Sweden's welfare state to write classic works about the poor
in America and in developing countries, died Sunday. He was 88.
Mr. Myrdal, author of "An American Dilemma," shared the 1974 Nobel Prize
in economics. He was the widower of Alva Myrdal, a 1982 Nobel Peace Prize
laureate.
Mr. Myrdal rose from Swedish village life to become one of his country's
leading intellectuals and true cosmopolitans, a thinker who helped change
fixed ideas in many fields.
At the age of 25 he married 22-year-old Alva Reimer, a university student
who was to win her own Nobel prize decades later in a remarkable 61-year
marriage.
Shortly before her death, she was asked how two such strong individuals
could live together for so many years. She replied that "Gunnar and I are like
ships in a convoy. Two different vessels, but we sail together."
"An American Dilemma," Myrdal's 1944 study of American blacks, was one of
the first books to probe racial problems in the United States and to expose
the differences between the American ideal and the reality of discrimination
and segregation.
It was also considered highly controversial, published in an era when
strict and open racial segregation was still widespread in the United States.
Mr. Myrdal had already made a name for himself as a young teacher of
economics at Stockholm University. One account described him as offering his
students the opportunity to "watch all the old theoretical garbage being torn
down and swept away."
With the controversy still raging over the book, Mr. Myrdal became
minister of labor the following year, and served as a Social Democrat in the
government for two years.
A versatile intellect, his political colleagues often took his intellectual
flexibility for lack of seriousness. He was described as shocking his
opponents with unexpected ideas and by bringing matters to a head.
More at home on the international scene, Myrdal was head of the United
Nations Economic Commission for Europe from 1947 to 1957, when he started 10
years of research on Asia.
The research project produced one of his central works, "Asian Drama,"
published in 1968. In it, Myrdal discussed problems of economic development in
Asia and voiced skepticism about solving Asian problems through Western-style
democracy.
For long periods of his life, Mr. Myrdal lived in the United States. He
won honorary doctorates from Harvard, Columbia and other major American
universities.
When he became chairman of a Swedish committee for Vietnam in 1968 and
helped organize antiwar demonstrations, he stressed that he was protesting a
war, not expressing anti-Americanism.
In 1974, he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Austrian
professor Friedrich von Hayek for work relating economic analysis to social,
demographic and other conditions.
His wife died in 1984. He leaves a son, Jan; and two daughters, Sissela
Bok and Kaj Foelster.
FINKEN;05/17 LDRISC;05/19,20:43 MYRDAL18
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