Gunnar Myrdal

Karl Gunnar Myrdal (1898 to 1987) was a Swedish economist and sociologist. He took a law degree at Stockholm University in 1923 and a doctorate in economics in 1927, and his early work on the role of expectations in price formation strongly influenced the Stockholm school of economics. For social theory he is best known for heading a Carnegie Corporation study of race relations in the United States, published in 1944 as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which influenced the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He later wrote Asian Drama, a three-volume inquiry into the poverty of nations, and founded the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University in 1961. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Friedrich Hayek, and in Sweden his work and political influence helped establish the welfare state.