Gunnar Myrdal

Economist

1898-12-06

Books by Gunnar Myrdal

An American dilemma
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Asian drama
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Economic theory and under-developed regions
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Quotes by Gunnar Myrdal

In society, liberty for one may mean the suppression of liberty for others.
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Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic.
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Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields.
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The short-term international capital market is shrunken and erratic, and cannot be relied upon to cushion the effects of tendencies to disequilibrium in the balance of payments.
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All sudden and violent changes, whatever their causes or character, must tend to decrease the respect for status quo as a natural order of things.
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So many social changes are as irreversible as the reaction when sodium is thrown into water.
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In the United States, and to only slightly lesser degree in all the other rich and economically progressive Western countries, public debate has at all times been dominated by the adherents of a free economy.
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In most circles, the idea of economic planning has been in disrepute most of the time and, particularly in America, has almost carried connotations of intellectual and moral perversion and even political subversion.
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It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism.
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Language, as we know, is full of illogicalities.
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Social taboos are shy like virtue; once lost, there is no remedy
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Planned parenthood in the social history of the Western countries is, indeed, a phenomenon instrin-sically related to those very changes in peoples attitudes which, on the political plane, have been causing the trend towards economic planning.
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As a forecaster, Marx shared the common destiny of all prophets: to be belied by events.
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Sometimes it looks as if, the better off they [nations] become, the bigger do they conceive the gap between what is actually their lot and what would be desirable, while in the poor countries large masses of people seem to be satisfied by merely surviving.
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People become less inhibited from wanting to change social and economic conditions in a radical fashion according to their own interests, and from being prepared to think of state intervention in ever wider spheres as possible and useful for this purpose.
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There is apparently nowhere a workable majority in the representative assemblies for making the specific cuts in expenditure which could bring down the taxes, and in election after election the people vote into power representatives who are as unable as they are unwilling to do anything about it.
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