Gunnar Myrdal
Swedish economist, sociologist and Social Democratic cabinet minister. Minister of Commerce 1945-1947 under Erlander, author of An American Dilemma (1944), head of the UN Economic Commission for Europe 1947-1957, and co-recipient of the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Friedrich Hayek.
Gunnar Myrdal was, with his wife Alva, one of the intellectual architects of the Folkhemmet welfare state. Their 1934 book Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the Population Question) reframed Swedish social policy as a human-capital investment, and several of its proposals — universal child allowance, maternity care, expanded housing — were absorbed into the SAP programme that Hansson and Erlander later legislated. Kris i befolkningsfrågan is, in retrospect, one of the foundational documents of Swedish social democracy.
In 1945 he entered the first Erlander cabinet as Minister of Commerce. He resigned in 1947 over the controversial krona-revaluation policy and moved to Geneva, where for ten years he served as Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe. In 1944 he had already produced, on a Carnegie Corporation commission, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy — a foundational text of post-war US social science that was repeatedly cited in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
In 1974 Myrdal received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, shared with Friedrich Hayek. The pairing of a Swedish Social Democrat with an Austrian-British classical liberal was widely read as a statement about the ideological range of mid-century economics; both laureates later expressed reservations about the joint award. Myrdal continued to write on race, development, and the institutional failure of welfare states until his death in 1987.