Gunnar Myrdal

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pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

World Bank, “Strengthening World Bank Engagement on Governance and Anticorruption,” March 21, 2007, p. 33. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTPUBLICSECTORANDGOVERNANCE/Resources/GACStrategyPaper.pdf, accessed September 6, 2013. CHAPTER 2: TWO NOBEL LAUREATES AND THE DEBATE THEY NEVER HAD 1. Gunnar Myrdal, Development and Under-Development: A Note on the Mechanism of National and International Inequality (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1956), p. 65. 2. Gunnar Myrdal, An International Economy: Problems and Prospects (New York: Harper, 1956), 145. 3. Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, 3 vols. (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1968), quoted in P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development: Studies and Debates in Development Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 187. 4.

Pierson, Ludwig von Mises, Georg Halm, and Enrico Barone (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2011), Kindle edition, locations 152–57. 52. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 1980. 53. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 180. 54. Gunnar Myrdal, Development and Under-Development: A Note on the Mechanism of National and International Inequality (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1956), 63 and 65. 55. Quoted in Bauer, Dissent on Development, 187. 56. Ibid., 206. 57. Ibid., 207. 58. Ibid., 189. 59. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 2216. 60. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 13831. 61. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, Kindle location 4350. 62. Ibid., 4070. 63. Gunnar Myrdal, “The Equality Issue in World Development,” 1974 Nobel Prize Lecture in Economic Sciences, March 17, 1975.

This clash drove him to articulate a vision of how individual rights were both an end in themselves and a means by which free individuals in a free society solved many of their own problems. Hayek depicted the solutions, including both private goods and government services, as emerging from competitive economic and political entrepreneurs. Hayek’s fellow Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal had very different views on how societies emerge from poverty into prosperity. The division between them was perhaps most fundamentally expressed by Myrdal’s opposite views on individual rights in development. Throughout his career, Myrdal did not feature an extensive role for individual rights in his writings about how development did or should happen.


Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

agricultural Revolution, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, failed state, financial independence, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, land tenure, liberal world order, market fundamentalism, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

Manley, Poverty of Nations, 93. 72. Nyerere, “Third World and the International Economic Structure,” 37. 73. Ibid., 37–­38. 74. Gunnar Myrdal, An International Economy: Problems and Prospects (New York: Harper and Row, 1956); Gunnar Myrdal, Rich Lands Poor Lands: The Road to World Prosperity (New York: Harper and Row, 1957); Gunnar Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning and Its International Implications (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960). For recent assessments of these texts, see Jamie Martin, “Gunnar Myrdal and the Failed Promises of the Postwar International Economic Settlement,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Hu­ manitarianism, and Development 8 (Spring 2017): 167–­73; Samuel Moyn, “Welfare World,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 8 (Spring 2017): 175–­83; Isaac Nakhimovsky, “An International Dilemma: The Postwar Utopianism of Gunnar Myrdal’s Beyond the Welfare State,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and De­ velopment 8 (Spring 2017): 185–­94. 75.

Arthur Lewis, Report on Industrialization and the Gold Coast Economy (Accra: Government Printers, 1953). 23. Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis, 169–­76; Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism, 80–­81, 130. 24. Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis, 176. 25. Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 97. 26. Ibid., 110; Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1957), 66. Myrdal’s Economic Theory was based on a series of lectures he had given to the National Bank of Egypt in 1955. The lectures were published as Gunnar Myrdal, Development and Underdevelopment: A Note on the Mechanism of National and International Economic Equality (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1956). 27. Myrdal, Development and Underdevelopment, 42–­43; Myrdal, Economic The­ ory and Underdeveloped Regions, 47–­48; “Union Government Is Essential to Economic Independence and Higher Living Standards,” in Files of Ex-­Presidential Affairs, Folder RG/17/2/1047 OAU Papers, Public Records and Archives Department. 28.

Instead, postcolonial states were subject to the vagaries of the international market in ways that persistently limited postcolonial nation-­building. In response to this structural dependence, nationalists envisioned an egalitarian global economy that required the internationalization of welfarism. Drawing on the work of Gunnar Myrdal, I thus characterize the NIEO as a welfare world that would enhance the bargaining the w elfa r e wor ld of the new economic or der [ 145 ] power of postcolonial states, institute international planning and coordination to generate equitable redistribution, and ensure democratic decision-­making.


The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

For this committee, consult Frederick Henry Osborn Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter Osborn Papers), Folder “Council on Population Policy.” 28. Gunnar Myrdal, The Essential Gunnar Myrdal, ed. Örjan Appelqvist and Stellan Andersson (New York: The New Press, 2005), xxii. 276 notes to chapter three 29. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944). 30. Gunnar Myrdal, Population: A Problem for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940), 130. 31. Ibid., 18. 32. Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (1941; reprint, with a foreword by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and new preface by the author, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1968), 2. 33.

In contrast, nineteenth-century American workers, concerned about the pressure of population growth on wages, erected what has been called a “working-class neo-Malthusianism.”13 And during much of the twentieth century, American liberalism incorporated the position that a smaller population would improve per capita incomes and reduce inequality. The Right has also divided on population matters. “Classical Manchester Liberalism [today’s anti-statist conservative economics] is founded on the Malthusian population doctrine,” observed Nobel laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal.14 Some conservatives have used Malthusian precepts to argue that charity is counterproductive because it merely exacerbates population growth. Meanwhile, the Left has accused conservative supporters of population control of fearing the masses. Business interests, however, often value the cheap labor that they assume follows steady population increase.

Also in 1935, the PAA, the American Eugenics Society, and leading birth control organizations joined forces to form the Council on Population Policy, an ad hoc committee that served as a clearinghouse for population information and reform efforts.27 The American campaign to enact population policies was part of a population depressed 81 trans-Atlantic effort to build more robust and pro-family welfare states, a new progressive way of thinking about state policy filtered through the prism of demography. In 1937, the Carnegie Corporation invited the Swedish population experts Alva and Gunnar Myrdal to the United States, primarily to study race relations.28 Gunnar’s famous resultant book, An America Dilemma (1944), helped spur the civil rights movement.29 But he also took the time to write Population: A Problem for Democracy (1940), based on lectures at Harvard. Gunnar, who would eventually win the Nobel Prize in Economics (Alva would win the Nobel Peace Prize) stressed the need to rejuvenate birthrates in the industrialized world, but he welcomed a stable population in the long term.


pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

The principle, but not the phrase, came from William Graham Sumner’s 1906 book Folkways. Decades later, Gunnar Myrdal paraphrased Sumner’s “legislation cannot make mores” as “stateways cannot change folkways.” William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1906), p. 77; Shirley Moody-Turner, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), pp. 18, 169 (note 1); Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), p. 1049. 3.

Because members of some groups were deemed to be intellectually capable of being no more than the proverbial “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” genetic determinists supported eugenics— a term coined by Francis Galton, who advocated “the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”62 As late as 1944, Gunnar Myrdal, in his landmark study, An American Dilemma, reported hearing “everywhere in contemporary white America” a belief in a “biological ceiling,” indicating that “the mind of the Negro race cannot be improved beyond a given level.” This belief was “phrased as an excuse by the Negro’s friends and as an accusation by his enemies.”63 The eugenics movement spanned the Atlantic.

Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (New York: Encounter Books, 2014), p. 49. 37. Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914, second edition (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006), p. 28. 38. See, for example, Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations (New York: Pantheon, 1968), Vol. III, p. 1642; Myron Weiner and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, India’s Preferential Policies: Migrants, the Middle Classes, and Ethnic Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 99. 39. Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism, translated by Charles Kormos, p. 60. 40.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

BBC News, 7 September 2017. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41109572 117 Alan Yuhas, “Muslim Population to Reach 10% by 2050, New Forecast Shows,” Guardian, 2 April 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/muslim-population-growth-christians-religion-pew 118 Patrick Worrall, “Fact Check: Will Britain Have a Muslim Majority by 2015?” Channel 4, 14 June 2013. http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck /factcheck-will-britain-have-a-muslim-majority-by-2050 119 “Gunnar Myrdal, Analyst of Race Crisis, Dies,” New York Times, 18 May 1987. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/18/obituaries/gunnar-myrdal-analyst-of-race-crisis-dies.html?pagewanted=all 120 Mary Johnson, “Alva and Gunnar Myrdal: The Great Happiness of ‘Living to Be Very Old and Together,’” People, 11 August 1980. http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20077164,00.html 121 Ibid. 122 Stephen Philip Kramer, “Sweden Pushed Gender Equality to Boost Birth Rates,” We News, 26 April 2014. http://womensenews.org/2014/04/sweden-pushed-gender-equality-boost-birth-rates 123 Kajsa Sundström, “Can Governments Influence Population Growth?”

Increased child supports, expanded daycare, legislated parental leave—surely there is some suite of incentives that could convince European couples to have the second or third baby. And indeed, some governments have tried. The results are mixed at best. The Swedish economist, sociologist, and politician Gunnar Myrdal was still a student at Stockholm University in the early 1920s, but already conspicuously brilliant and brash. A professor, so the story goes, once warned him to be more respectful to his elders “because it is we who will determine your promotion.” “Yes,” Myrdal replied, “but it is we who will write your obituaries.”119 One night, the railway worker’s son stopped at a farmhouse while on a cycling trip.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

., p. 10. 7Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén, “Eugenics in Sweden: Efficient Care” in Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing, 2005), p. 104. 8Stellan Andersson, “On the Value of Personal Archives: Some Examples from the Archives of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal—with a Main Focus on Gunnar,” http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/nordeuropaforum/1999-1/anderssonstellan-15/XML/ (accessed March 3, 2015). 9Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén, “Eugenics in Sweden: Efficient Care” in Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing, 2005), p. 97. 10Örjan Appelqvist, The Political Economy of Gunnar Myrdal: Transcending Dilemmas Post-2008 (London and New York, 2013), p. 1. 11Gunnar Myrdal, “Prize Lecture: The Equality Issue in World Development,” March 17, 1975, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/myrdal-lecture.html. 12Jay Nordlinger, Peace, They Say; A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World (New York and London, 2012), p. 245. 13Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén, “Eugenics in Sweden: Efficient Care” in Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing, 2005), p. 105. 14Roland Huntford, The New Totalitarians (London, 1971), pp. 62–63. 15Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén, “Eugenics in Sweden: Efficient Care” in Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing, 2005), pp. 114–115. 16Ibid., p. 115. 17Ibid., p. 107. 18Ibid., p. 108. 19Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing, 2005), pp. ix and xi. 20Ibid., p. 122. 21Joachim Israel, “An Excerpt from Ett upproriskt liv (A rebellious life) in Peter Stenberg (Ed.)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the average Swedish family had four children, falling sharply in the next two decades. By 1934, Sweden had the lowest birth rate in the world.7 The same year, the leading architects of the Swedish welfare state, the husband and wife partnership of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, wrote down their thoughts on the subject. “Population is the connecting subject,” Alva recalled, but from that point of view we deal with all social problems: from housing to individual qualities, sterilization, abortion, “the family in the world,” nursery schools, equal wages, school feeding, socialization of medicine, Malthus, the eighties, individualism etc. etc. . . .

As distinct from the early eugenicists, they saw population less in biological terms than as a “mathematical or physical quantity.”9 Despite Alva’s expectation about the book creating enemies, the Myrdals reduced their number by deleting sections on eugenics from the English edition, while copies of the Swedish first edition became something of a collector’s item. This helped remove a potential obstacle to the Myrdals’ stellar postwar reputation, especially in the United States. “Gunnar Myrdal taught me more about economics than anyone else in his generation,” J. K. Galbraith wrote in 2005. “He is more relevant now than ever.”10 In 1974, Gunnar was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics. Showing a rare flash of humor, the Nobel committee made him share it with Friedrich von Hayek. Gunnar repaid the compliment in his prize lecture, which barely touched on economics as conventionally understood but showed why he was a darling of the American left.


pages: 669 words: 226,737

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

Kearny's rather humdrum study, Thurman Arnold, Social Critic (1970); and by Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (1966), which describes Arnold's antitrust campaign and some of the reasons for its failure. The extensive body of commentary on Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944), attests to the book's status both as a sociological classic and as a reference point in the civil rights movement. David Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black‐ White Relations (1987), provides a useful introduction to this commentary. Among the early reviews that helped to establish Myrdal's study as definitive, see, in particular, the ones by Robert S. Lynd, Saturday Review of Literature, 22 April 1944, 5ff.; E.

THE POLITICS OF THE CIVILIZED MINORITY Liberal Perceptions of the Public after World War I 412 America the Unbeautiful 416 Social Criticism, Disembodied and Connected 421 Sociology as Social Criticism: The Apotheosis of the Expert 424 Experts and Orators: Thurman Arnold's "Anthropological" Satire 429 The "Machiavelli" of the Managerial Revolution 435 From Satire to Social Pathology: Gunnar Myrdal on the "American Dilemma " 439 The Discovery of the Authoritarian Personality 445 Politics as Therapy 450 The Liberal Critique of Populism 455 Populism as Working-Class Authoritarianism 460 -11- Educated Insularity 465 Camelot after Kennedy: Oswald as Everyman 468 ii.

In spite of his early years in Wyoming, the spectacle of Thurman Arnold as a champion of the small producer was inherently unconvincing. His accent—the characteristic accent of the New Deal, of genial contempt, sophisticated raillery, and hard-boiled humanitarianism—gave him away as a charter member of the civilized minority. From Satire to Social Pathology: Gunnar Myrdal on the "American Dilemma" Poor Arnold! If the public could not take him seriously as a populist and trustbuster, the new class could not take him seriously as a social scientist. His books were far too lively, his manner too breezy and irreverent, his footnotes too few and far between. Satire, it turned out, was not to be the approved form of managerial speech.


pages: 388 words: 119,492

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, Cass Sunstein, correlation does not imply causation, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, mass incarceration

Wilkerson said about half were gang-related Molotov cocktail cases—“message-sending” arsons, he called them, aimed at intimidating people, and very difficult to solve. “No one wants to talk,” he said. 16 When the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal He further concluded that “leniency toward Negro defendants in crimes involving other Negroes is actually a form of discrimination.” Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944; 1962 reprint), pp. 542, 551. 17 “the principal injury suffered by African-Americans” Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law, p. 19.

“Take care of business!” He obeyed, and days later killed the victor. Black residents in the area had long complained not just of mistreatment by police, but also that the cops did little to catch the killers and violent assailants in their midst. It was a historic grievance. When the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal studied the black South in the 1940s, he found that, despite rampant complaints about law enforcement, black Southerners everywhere also said they wanted more policing—to protect them from other black people. South Bureau officers heard some version of the lament several times a day: “It ain’t like I’m out here doin’ something.

Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941; reprint University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 241. 22 They enlisted blacks as spies Mention of spies and informants crops up in many accounts of the Jim Crow south—for example, Powdermaker’s description of a “mulatto man who acts as a ‘go-between’ for the white and colored people and who is something of a spy, with an unsavory reputation” (Powdermaker, After Freedom, p. 184), and also Gunnar Myrdal’s mention of the use of black “informers, spotters, and stool pigeons” by police (Myrdal, An American Dilemma, p. 541). But one of the most vivid examples was offered to this writer by Ray Knox, a retired L.A. County Youth Authority counselor born in 1951, who is black and was a frequent childhood visitor to his family’s native McComb, Mississippi.


pages: 470 words: 137,882

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

The caste system, and the attempts to defend, uphold, or abolish the hierarchy, underlay the American Civil War and the civil rights movement a century later and pervade the politics of twenty-first-century America. Just as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development, caste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation. In 1944, the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal and a team of the most talented researchers in the country produced a 2,800-page, two-volume work that is still considered perhaps the most comprehensive study of race in America, An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s investigation into race led him to the realization that the most accurate term to describe the workings of American society was not race, but caste, that perhaps it was the only term that addresses what seemed a stubbornly fixed ranking of human value.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the white working-class American, wrote the white southern author Lillian Smith, “has not only been neglected and exploited, he has been fed little except the scraps of ‘skin color’ and ‘white supremacy’ as spiritual nourishment.” Working-class whites, the preeminent social economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, “need the demarcations of caste more than upper class whites. They are the people likely to stress aggressively that no Negro can ever attain the status of even the lowest white.” In a psychic way, the people dying of despair could be said to be dying of the end of an illusion, an awakening to the holes in an article of faith that an inherited, unspoken superiority, a natural deservedness over subordinated castes, would assure their place in the hierarchy.

People drove in from neighboring states, schools let out early so that white children could join their parents to watch men in the dominant caste perform acts of sadism on people from the subordinate caste before hanging them from the limb of a sycamore. Lynchings almost always occurred “at the hands of persons unknown,” performed “in a collective way so that no one person could be blamed.” “Whites were unified in seeing the Negro as a scapegoat and proper object for exploitation and hatred,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal, a leading social economist in the 1940s. “White solidarity is upheld and the caste order protected.” As scapegoats, they are seen as the reason for societal ills. The scapegoats are blamed for a crime rate that they alone do not cause and for drugs that they are no more likely to use than the dominant caste, but for which they are incarcerated at six times the rate as whites accused of similar offenses.


Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

By this he meant the universal male suffrage in industrialized nations that brought “the p ­ eople and their passions, the interest groups and chaotic powers of the masses” into politics.16 The post-1945 era spread what Wilhelm Röpke called the “rabies demo­cratica” globally.17 As the first colonies gained in­de­pen­dence from their imperial masters, the international institutions, and the United Nations in par­tic­u­lar, became spaces for po­liti­cal claims-­making.18 As one-­ person-­one-­vote became one-­country-­one-­vote, Global South nations found spokespeople among the very social demo­cratic economists that the neoliberals had clashed with in the 1930s. Liberals like Haberler and Alexander Loveday had set the tone at the early League of Nations, but it was social demo­crats like the Swedish Gunnar Myrdal and the Hungarians Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh who dominated the young UN. The new language of “development” and the subfield of “development economics” helped legitimize worldwide demands for full employment, capital controls, and the right to nationalize foreign-­owned assets and resources.

Extending Röpke’s meta­phor, one could say that the vines of the state ­were creeping outward through an expanding foreign aid program of government loans, which had drawn in the West German partner by 1960, and the more aggressive use of trade u ­ nions, including the establishment of the American Institute of F ­ ree ­Labor Development as part of Kennedy’s Alliance for Pro­gress. Röpke called foreign aid “the ­great action by which the ideas and methods of collectivist policy are carried into the world economy” and singled out economist Gunnar Myrdal as proposing the “transposition” of the modern welfare state from the Western to what Röpke called the “undeveloped” world (consciously avoiding the normative term “­underdeveloped”).78 In his article, Röpke attacked by name two authors of the Keynesian growth model and modernization theory, John Kenneth Galbraith and Walt Whitman Rostow, maintaining that the latter preached a “new version of the Roo­se­veltian illusionism in the dress of economic determinism . . . ​which is not nearly as far removed from that of Marx as Prof.

They could thereby continue to subsidize their own production while also granting better market access to the products of developing nations. The colonial association clauses in the Rome treaty “had breached the wall” of postwar liberal norms, as one scholar put it, and the wave of preferences that followed veered from the GATT credo of nondiscrimination.208 The result was what Gunnar Myrdal called (approvingly) a “double standard of morality in international trade”—an expectation of reciprocity between industrialized nations and “special and differential treatment” between North and South. African nations renewed their association with the EEC a­ fter the wave of decolonization in the Yaoundé Agreement of 1963, signed symbolically in Cameroon to reflect the new balance of power; 216 GLOBALISTS they did so again with Yaoundé II in 1969.209 The agreement on a Generalized System of Preferences for developing nations in 1968 was another turning point as the United States followed the model of nonreciprocity pioneered by the EEC.210 To neoliberals, it was the historically inflected model of Eurafrica, not the spaceless world of Haberler’s League of Nations imaginary, that became the template for the 1960s.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

It is not often realistic in economics. If one believes in an efficient market for ideas or knowledge, one may feel that it is a waste of time to read anything that is more than a few years old. Many economists today feel that way, and some read only the latest articles in good economic journals. However, as Gunnar Myrdal wrote in a brilliant essay first published in 1929, “we cannot pretend to understand completely, or even to define logically, the economic-political speculation of recent times except in the perspective of historical evolution” (p. x). Myrdal pointed out that in economics “the number of authentically recognized general truths is … very small” (ibid., p. xiii).

At that time economics was attracting an increasing number of individuals whose initial training had been in physics or mathematics. Mathematics became the language preferred by many economists. It gave economics a look of rigor and precision that it had not had in the past. This new approach would ignore a warning issued in 1953 by Gunnar Myrdal that, for economics, “belief in the existence of a body of scientific 52 Termites of the State knowledge acquired independently of all valuations is … naïve empiricism” (see Myrdal, 1954, preface). Two different approaches were followed by countries in the pursuit of their policy objectives.

The more fires or illnesses there are, the greater must be the interventions. There were few if any doubts expressed in the 1950s by the authors of many of those papers about the need for the calls and perhaps also about the ability of the firefighters or the doctors to perform satisfactorily the functions they were called for. However, as Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish Nobel Prize winner in economics, had pointed out in a brilliant article, originally published in Swedish, as early as 1929, “all normative economic doctrines are largely rationalization of political attitudes” (Myrdal, 1954, p. 137), and political attitudes are likely to change over long periods of time.


pages: 215 words: 60,489

1947: Where Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, disinformation, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, trade route

Together they have explored New York and returned to Chicago, drunk Chianti in the city’s Italian neighborhood, visited the state penitentiary, listened to music, eaten rum cake, sipped whisky, and wandered through streets that seem forgotten by the world around them. Nelson talked about the Swede Gunnar Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma, which he thinks Simone should read. Back in Paris, she does just two things: sleep and cry. On September 27, the morning of the third day, she goes out to deal with some practical matters and runs into Albert Camus. Seeing her swollen face, he asks if she is pregnant.

Next to his studio is a large, empty building, a kind of shed. The roof is full of holes. Pots and pans are placed on the ground to catch the rainwater, but they too have holes, so the water trickles out, forming rivulets and puddles. She writes to Nelson that she has finished writing the book about her time in America and that she is reading Gunnar Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma. The similarities between the situation of African Americans and that of women nudge Simone into resuming work on the book she has long meant to write — on the second sex. She wants it to be just as substantial and just as important a work as Myrdal’s. Jura George Orwell types away nonstop in the upstairs bedroom, chain-writing, chain-smoking, chain-coughing.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

But there was a tendency everywhere for kings to promote powerful bureaucrats (Thomas Cromwell in England, Cardinal Richelieu in France, Count-Duke Olivares in Spain) who expanded the power of central government, established more efficient tax-gathering machines, and rationalized the higgledy-piggledy mass of local tolls, regulations, and restrictions that had characterized medieval Europe. This allowed Europe to escape from the problem that doomed Indian civilization to impotence: a state that was so weak—or so “soft” in Gunnar Myrdal’s phrase—that society constantly dissolved into petty principalities, principalities that inevitably fell prey to more powerful invaders, be they Muslims or Britons. At the same time even Europe’s most powerful monarchs were far less powerful than the Chinese emperor, whose vast bureaucracy (staffed by the brightest people in the country chosen by rigorous examination) had no opposition from China’s landed aristocracy or the urban middle classes.

Enlightened bureaucrats built the folkhemmet, or “people’s home,” where the state looked after everybody’s needs and blond bureaucrats organized everything along rational lines, right down to the correct design for your kitchen. Meanwhile socially responsible companies like Volvo and Ericsson generated wealth. This was “the middle way” between capitalism and communism, celebrated by Marquis Childs in his 1936 book of that name. Sweden even had its own version of the Webbs in Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, who championed economic planning, eugenic breeding, and men sharing the housework. But in the 1960s, as the concept of equality broadened, Sweden veered even further left than the rest of Europe. It abolished selective education in the name of “child-centered learning” (i.e., letting teenagers run riot) and advocated the equalization of incomes in the name of social solidarity.

The Social Democratic Party, which ruled the place for forty-four uninterrupted years from 1932 to 1976, kept squeezing business with higher taxes and more regulations. “The era of neo-capitalism is drawing to an end,” said Olof Palme, the party’s leader, in 1974. “It is some kind of socialism that is the key to the future.” That was also the year that Gunnar Myrdal was given a Nobel Prize in economics, sharing it, in a bizarre twist of fate, with Friedrich Hayek. Eight years later Alva won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on disarmament. By 1990 it would be hard to think of anywhere that more perfectly illustrated Lee Kuan Yew’s dismissive “all you can eat” state.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

John Weeks believed that it was just self-interest: ‘our profession gains disproportionately from the existing social and economic order. This is why economics provides no guide to an alternative social and economic system in which inequality, acquisitiveness, and exploitation would be eliminated’ (ibid.: 1). He might be right, but our concern here is simply to illuminate the value judgements, not to explain them. Gunnar Myrdal (1969) dismissed any pretence that social scientists might make about their ‘objectivity’ and pointed out that value judgements must permeate their work. Instead, he advocated making one’s value judgements explicit so the reader would be aware of them and could decide whether to accept them. Sadly, his advice has gone largely unheeded and readers must be alert to detect hidden value judgements on their own.

It tends to favour sustained overall development, and it delivers increased opportunities to the poorest groups in a ­society.’ François Bourguignon, chief economist, World Bank (World Bank 2005) The economists who participated in the development of the advanced welfare states of northern Europe in the middle of the twentieth century learned from experience its growth-enhancing effects. Gunnar Myrdal explained that welfare state policies were created despite the belief that they would result in lower growth. But then ‘the idea emerged that welfare reforms, instead of being costly for a society, were actually laying the basis for a more steady and rapid economic growth’. Investing in housing, nutrition, health and education and redistributing income to families with children, especially to underprivileged families, pays off by avoiding future costs and increasing future productivity (Myrdal 1973: 40–41).

Looking at the experience of about twenty OECD countries between the early 1960s and the mid-1990s, he found no significant effect of social transfers on economic growth (Lindert 2004b: vol. 2, ch. 18). 211 9  |  Government, taxation most prosperous countries and its people among the happiest. How can a place like Denmark exist if there is a serious trade-off between efficiency and equity? While a lot can be learned from the experience of places like Denmark or Gunnar Myrdal’s Sweden, economists also like to consider the combined experience of many countries. The endogenous growth theories were developed at the same time as enough data had accumulated to make statistical examination of a large sample of countries possible (Lindert 2004a). Studies examined the growth–inequality relationship looking at groups of countries, while taking into account the many other factors that economic theory suggests will also influence growth (Persson and Tabellini 1994; Alesina and Rodrik 1994; Barro 2000).


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

The problem is international as well. In Sweden, where progressive taxes and social programs are more advanced than under the American system, the divorce rate is 60 percent higher, and illegitimacy exceeds ours by a factor of three, with one-third of Swedish children born out of wedlock,23 and as famed socialist Gunnar Myrdal said, “High taxes are making us into a nation of hustlers.”24 The income distribution tables also propagate a statistical illusion with regard to the American rich. While the patterns of annual income changed rather little in the 1970s, there was a radical shift in the distribution of wealth.

Particularly in Britain and Sweden there is ample evidence that tax avoidance reached epidemic levels in the late 1970s. In Sweden worker absenteeism rose to an annual average of sixteen days (compared to 3.5 days in the United States)27 and workforce withdrawal became such a problem that the government proposed to tax hobbies and other leisure activities. Famed economist Gunnar Myrdal, a lifetime socialist, was led to denounce income taxes. Myrdal wrote,My main conclusion is that income taxes are bad taxes from several points of view.... For the majority of people... a high and progressively increasing marginal tax rate must decrease the willingness to work more than necessary....

Of all the deficiencies in our income tax system, for me the most serious is that the laws directly invite us to commit tax evasion and tax cheating. The honesty of Swedes has been a source of pride to me and my generation. Now I have a feeling that we are becoming a nation of hustlers because of bad laws!28 Gunnar Myrdal, meet Arthur Laffer. In the late 1970s Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo of Puerto Rico was so fortunate as to meet Laffer; and Jude Wanniski, who had also conferred with Barcelo, was bold enough to end his book with a prediction that retrenchment of Puerto Rico’s upper-bracket tax rates would bring higher growth and revenues.


America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

The intense, specifically Southern racism of President Woodrow Wilson, for example, deeply compromised his liberal internationalism in the eyes of the Japanese and many other non-White peoples of the 41 AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG world, in his own time and since.86 As the American theologian, moralist and political thinker Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) wrote in 1943, "Our racial pride is incompatible with our responsibilities in the world community. If we do not succeed in chastening it, we shall fail in our task." Gunnar Myrdal's great work of 1944, An American Dilemma, was also motivated in part by anxiety at the way in which racism at home was weakening the American struggle against totalitarianism.87 During the early years of the Cold War, recognition of the way in which domestic treatment of Blacks undermined U.S. power and influence in the struggle with communism was a major factor in the decision of U.S. national elites to eliminate the public face of this racism in the 1950s and 1960s.88 Much earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had warned that slavery weakened America's world democratic mission by exposing the nation to the charge of hypocrisy.89 When comparing the contemporary United States to other great civilizations of the past, it is vitally important to make a distinction between racism and cultural prejudice.

The transition was closely related to the emergence of new forms of evangelical Protestant popular religion, which radically downgraded the position of the old elite-dominated churches and which had strong anti-intellectual and antimodern biases. This democracy categorically excluded Indians, Blacks and women.42 As Jackson's own mixture of Southern and Frontier origins indicates, the American Frontier and the American South might be treated almost as one cultural complex in terms of their cultural impact on American nationalism. Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 described the South as a "stubbornly lagging American frontier society."43 What we have been taught by Hollywood to think of as the classic Frontier, in the West, was settled largely by Southerners with Southern cultural traits. The mingling of the Southern and Western traditions is at its most obvious in Texas, the home state of George W.

Kenneth Minogue, Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 11. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 15. 12. Figures in "Global Attitudes 2002:44-Nation Major Survey," The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC, released November 5, 2003. See www.people-press.org. 13. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1944), p. xlviii. 223 N O T E S TO P A G E S 8-11 14. Cf. David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 7-8; for a succinct recent statement of the nativist position on the Creed from a leading conservative intellectual, see Samuel Huntington, "The Hispanic Challenge," Foreign Policy (March/April 2004), and "Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite," National Interest, no. 75 (Spring 2004). 15.


pages: 147 words: 42,682

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty

Our history is riddled with failures to achieve our ideal, starting with the Declaration’s failure to condemn slavery, but the American creed itself has always been powerful. Over the course of the nineteenth century, both the abolitionist and the feminist movements drew their moral authority and their ultimate successes from appeals to live up to the American creed. In the early 1940s, writing in his landmark book, An American Dilemma, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal capitalized the term and marveled at the creed’s continuing universality. “Even a poor and uneducated white person in some isolated and backward rural region in the Deep South who is violently prejudiced against the Negro and intent upon depriving him of civic rights and human independence, has also a whole compartment in his valuation sphere housing the entire American Creed of liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for everybody,” he wrote.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

The genius of the first generation of America’s political leaders was not that they created foolproof institutions, but that, in addition to designing very good institutions, they—gradually and with difficulty—established a set of shared beliefs and practices that helped make those institutions work. The strength of the American political system, it has often been said, rests on what Swedish Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed: the principles of individual freedom and egalitarianism. Written into our founding documents and repeated in classrooms, speeches, and editorial pages, freedom and equality are self-justifying values. But they are not self-executing. Mutual toleration and institutional forbearance are procedural principles—they tell politicians how to behave, beyond the bounds of law, to make our institutions function.

the legislature voted to shrink: “Rebuked Twice by Supreme Court, North Carolina Republicans Are Unabashed,” New York Times, May 27, 2017. “American democracy”: Quoted in Purdy, “North Carolina’s Partisan Crisis.” Baron de Montesquieu pioneered: Baron von Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). American Creed: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), pp. 3–4. “The Democratic negotiating position”: David Faris, “It’s Time for Democrats to Fight Dirty,” The Week, December 1, 2016. “doing little to stop him”: Dahlia Lithwick and David S. Cohen, “Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans,” New York Times, December 14, 2016.


Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, business climate, colonial rule, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, land reform, managed futures, microcredit, open economy, operational security, rolling blackouts, Seymour Hersh, unemployed young men

-U.N. aid community deployed on the Korean peninsula were in line with contemporary international thinking on how economic development should proceed. A consensus emerged in the 1950s that national economic planning should be the focal point of development and that the state was the best institution in poor nations to push development forward. In the 1950s and 1960s, influential thinkers in international economics like Gunnar Myrdal, W. Arthur Lewis, Alexander Gerschenkron, and John Kenneth Galbraith emphasized this point of view. Echoing the earlier opinions of Fairbank and others, such thinking held that governments had to perform certain economic and social tasks best done through state planning, as critical sectors of civil society were often too weak to perform the tasks alone.10 Planning was therefore widely accepted in the United States and internationally as an integral part of effective nation-building in the postwar period.

“The Voluntary Agency—What Is It?” May 22, 1957, reel 21, Records Relating to the Internal Affairs of Korea, 1955–59, RG 59, National Archives, College Park, Md. 9. Burton I. Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953– 1961 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 10. Gunnar Myrdal, Development and Underdevelopment: A Note on the Mechanism of National and International Economic Inequality (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1956), 62; W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1955); Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); John Kenneth Galbraith, Economic Development (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). 11.


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Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Dominant classes and hegemonic class alliances can form and lend a specific character to political as well as to economic activity within the region. Regional economies form a loosely connected mosaic of uneven geographical development within which some regions tend to become richer while poor regions get poorer. This happens because of what Gunnar Myrdal calls circular and cumulative causation.1 Advanced regions draw new activity to themselves because of the vibrancy of their markets, the greater strength of their physical and social infrastructures and the ease with which they can procure their necessary means of production and labour supplies.

Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993. 8. Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, London, Verso, 2010. 9. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, p. 490. Contradiction 11: Uneven Geographical Developments and the Production of Space 1. Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions, London, Duckworth, 1957. 2. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2002. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989. Contradiction 12: Disparities of Income and Wealth 1.


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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The blatant contradiction between the country’s opposition to the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and the continued existence of a racial caste system in the United States was proving embarrassing, severely damaging the nation’s credibility as leader of the “free world.” There was also increased concern that, without greater equality for African Americans, blacks would become susceptible to communist influence, given Russia’s commitment to both racial and economic equality. In Gunnar Myrdal’s highly influential book The American Dilemma, published in 1944, Myrdal made a passionate plea for integration based on the theory that the inherent contradiction between the “American Creed” of freedom and equality and the treatment of African Americans was not only immoral and profoundly unjust, but was also against the economic and foreign-policy interests of the United States.30 The Supreme Court seemed to agree.

Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967). 25 Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 64. 26 William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (University of Chicago Press, 1978), 54. 27 Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 80. 28 Ibid., 81. 29 Ibid., 7. 30 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944). 31 Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 44; see also Michael Klarman, “Brown, Racial Change, and the Civil Rights Movement,” Virginia Law Review 80 (1994), 7, 9. 32 Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion, 69. 33 Stephen F.


pages: 453 words: 122,586

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

“All my life I have tried to take this warning to heart,” Samuelson said, “and I dare call it to your favorable attention.” Four years after Samuelson’s Nobel in 1970, Friedrich Hayek was awarded the seventh Nobel Prize for economics, but his nomination was considered so controversial he was obliged to share the award with Gunnar Myrdal, a left-leaning Swedish economist and sociologist known for his work on exposing racial problems in America. Samuelson was pleased for Hayek. “In my judgment his was a worthy choice,” said Samuelson. “And yet in the 1974 senior common rooms of Harvard and MIT, the majority of the inhabitants there seemed not to even know the name of this new laureate.”22 SIX YEARS ELAPSED between Samuelson and Friedman being awarded the economics Nobel.

Nayer, October 13, 1970. Hoover Institution Friedman archive. 18.Samuelson named Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, Paul Douglas, Joseph Schumpeter, Wassily Leontief, Gottfried Haberler, Alvin Hansen, Lloyd Metzler, Robert Solow, James Tobin, Lawrence Klein, Robert Mundell, Joseph Stiglitz, Bertil Ohlin, Gunnar Myrdal, Erik Lundberg, Ingvar Svennilson, Gustav Cassel, Erik Lindahl, and Knut Wicksell. 19.https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/samuelson-lecture.pdf. 20.Ibid. 21.Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen in Norway (July 30, 1857–August 3, 1929), economist and sociologist best known for his idea of “conspicuous consumption”: people engage in conspicuous consumption, along with “conspicuous leisure,” to demonstrate their wealth or to mark social status. 22.Samuelson, “A few remembrances of Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992),” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 69, no. 1, January 2009, pp. 1–4. 23.Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, p. 445. 24.Larry Martz, “A Nobel for Friedman,” Newsweek, October 25, 1974. 25.Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, p. 442. 26.Ibid. 27.Newsweek, October 25, 1976. 28.Friedman letter to Samuelson, October 20, 1976.


pages: 124 words: 30,520

Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen's Guide to Reinventing Politics by Manuel Arriaga

banking crisis, behavioural economics, business climate, David Graeber, digital divide, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, Gunnar Myrdal, John Bogle, Occupy movement, principal–agent problem, Slavoj Žižek

When that happens, less income will be available for consumption, and we’ll find ourselves back at square one. If we step off the treadmill for a moment, we see that this cycle of increasing consumption and accumulating debt is impossible to sustain. It takes little more than “hard, simple thinking” (as Nobel-prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal put it) to conclude that, on a planet with finite resources, ever-increasing consumption threatens us with environmental collapse. Not much more effort is involved in understanding the issues caused by a gigantic mountain of debt. In May 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported that the total world debt load stood at 313% of the global GDP.


pages: 187 words: 55,801

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

Most of all, we thank our wives, Katherine Swartz and Mary Jo Murnane, for sharing their lives with us and for always being there for us. This page intentionally left blank This page intentionally left blank ON MARCH 22, 1964, THE AD HOC COMMITTEE ON THE TRIPLE Revolution sent a fourteen-page memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson. The signers included chemist Linus Pauling (recipient of two Nobel Prizes), economist Gunnar Myrdal (a future Nobel Prize-winner), and Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American. In the memo, the committee warned the president of long-run threats to the nation beginning with the likelihood that computers would soon create mass unemployment. A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural.


pages: 494 words: 132,975

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

As Samuelson recalled, “In the 1974 senior common rooms of Harvard and MIT, the majority of the inhabitants there seemed not to even know the name of this new laureate.”29 The reasoning behind the Nobel committee’s decision to recognize Hayek’s contribution to “pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations” was not quite the endorsement it seemed. Hayek had to share the honor with Gunnar Myrdal,30 a Swedish Keynesian economist and social democratic politician. According to Friedman,31 by yoking Myrdal to Hayek the Nobel committee hoped to avoid the charge of sympathizing with the Left. In the event, the double bill provoked substantial controversy, with Hayek declaring that Nobel Prizes for economics were absurd and worth neither giving nor receiving, and Myrdal condemning the Nobel committee for honoring Hayek.

., pp. 386–387. 27 Milton Friedman, in “Commanding Heights, PBS, http://www/pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/tr_show01.html#1. 28 Herbert Stein, Presidential Economics (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985), p. 255. 29 Paul Samuelson, “A Few Remembrances of Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992).” 30 Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987), Swedish economist and government minister whose pioneering work on the living conditions of African-Americans is credited with the campaign to educate all Americans that culminated in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Friedman, who met him a number of times at Columbia, thought him “awfully charming and intelligent.”


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

By the end of the decade, Democrats outnumbered Republicans two to one. Postwar prosperity altered the analysis of modern society. John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society (1957) and New Industrial State (1968), Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology (1959), Robert Theobald’s Challenge of Abundance (1961), and Gunnar Myrdal’s Challenge to Affluence (1963) all rested upon the assumption that the historic conflicts between capital and labor had been resolved. Affluence fostered new thinking about leisure, human relations, consumerism, and a host of extra-economic concerns. Keynes was a pioneer here too. In 1932, he thought that “the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and … the arena of the heart and head will be occupied where it belongs, or reoccupied by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.”51 No longer did leaders accept the ancient nostrum that the poor will always be with us.

But everyone agreed that unemployment would hover around 7.7 percent during 1976. So the economic debates continued. When economies do poorly, the reigning economic paradigms are questioned. Keynesianism was in trouble, but the alternative was not evident. The Nobel Prize committee perfectly captured the impasse. On October 9, 1974, it announced that Gunnar Myrdal, the social democratic Swedish economist, and Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian-born British free marketer, would share the prize for economics.65 Following that script, left and right formulated alternatives for the United States. CRITIQUE OF KEYNES — THE LEFT Initially, the critique of Keynes from the left was more powerful because it was powered by mass movements.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

A whole new field of economics was invented called “development economics.” A Polish-born economist named Paul Rosenstein-Rodan in the 1940s called for a “Big Push” to move the third world into the first. Scholars in politics and sociology and many other fields studied “development” of the poor countries. Economist, sociologist, and later Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal said in 1956 that the answer to poverty was a plan: “It is now commonly agreed that an underdeveloped country should have…an overall integrated national plan…under the encouraging and congratulating applause of the advanced countries.” Myrdal used dramatic language in favor of such plans, language that echoes today’s (italics in original): “The alternative to making the heroic attempt is continued acquiescence in economic and cultural stagnation or regression which is politically impossible in the world of today.” 38 Amen to that, except that the heroic plan failed to end economic stagnation or even to realize its potential to address simpler needs.

“To the peoples sitting in darkness,” in Charles Neider, ed., The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. 36.Rist, p. 60. 37.M. J. Bonn, Crumbling of Empire: The Disintegration of World Economy, London: Allen & Unwin, 1938, quoted in Knorr, British Colonial Theories. 38.Gunnar Myrdal, “Development and Underdevelopment,” Cairo, 1956, pp. 63 and 65, quoted in P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971; rev. ed., 1976, p. 70. 39.See Peter Bauer, Economic Analysis and Policy in Underdeveloped Countries, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1957; and Bauer, Dissent on Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. 40.Speech by Gordon Brown at a DFID/UNDP seminar, “Words into Action in 2005,” January 26, 2005, Lancaster House, London. 41.Multiplying their respective 2003 growth rates by their 2002 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) GDP in current U.S. dollars.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Politicians in the West who pushed for greater reliance on markets in their own economies and the world after the Reagan-Thatcher revolution could hardly have expected that the much-vaunted globalization would fail to deliver palpable benefits to the majority of their citizens—that is, precisely to those whom they were trying to convince of the advantages of neoliberal policies compared with more protectionist welfare regimes. But such a statement would appear even more surprising to those, including the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal, who worried in the late 1960s that the Asian masses, numbering many millions and barely able to survive on their low incomes, would remain mired in perpetual poverty. An entire literature of the 1950s and 1960s (such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb [1968]) had as its main theme the dangers that population growth presented for economic development in the Third World.


pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

For every other researcher who runs cross-country growth analyses, perhaps it is time to shut down the statistics programs and play minesweeper on the computer instead. Of course, along with most of the thinking about what causes growth, the idea that growth may be too complex to model isn’t new, either. Forty-plus years ago, Nobel prize–winning Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal argued that economic growth “concerns a complex of interlocking, circular, and cumulative changes.” Myrdal in turn may have been remembering John Maynard Keynes, the dominant economist of the first half of the twentieth century, who argued that “we are faced at every turn with the problems of organic unity, of discreteness, of discontinuity—the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, comparisons of quantity fail us, small changes produce large effects, and the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied.”17 And Keynes no doubt lifted the idea from somewhere in Adam Smith’s collected works.


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

American liberalism, Michael Walzer has argued, distinguishes itself by the most decisive emphasis on the rights of the individual, which means that the state is conceived as strictly neutral, without any cultural or religious project or indeed any collective goal beyond personal freedom and the physical protection, welfare and security of its citizens.82 At the same time, Americans recognize and experience something like a ‘national community’ (much more chosen or elective than the German Gemeinschaft), which is what Gunnar Myrdal has called the ‘American faith’ and others, alluding to Rousseau, call a ‘civil religion’. According to the ideal, this living faith in democracy and political freedom supersedes all the differences and oppositions of skin colour, religious denomination, income level, gender and political persuasion.


pages: 516 words: 159,734

War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR by John Dower

anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, Scientific racism, seminal paper, South China Sea, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway

A confidential poll conducted by black interviewers found that 18 percent of blacks queried admitted “pro-Japanese inclinations,” while a mid-war book on the theme “inside Black America” concluded from a survey of editorials and letters to the editor in the black press that blacks as a whole neither supported nor condemned Japan, but rather viewed the war in Asia from a “neutralized” stance. Gunnar Myrdal, whose massive pioneer study of black Americans was published in 1944, emphasized their “thoroughly American” outlook and their loyalty in the current war. As a whole, he concluded, they were as prodemocratic and antifascist as most white groups. At the same time, Myrdal also observed that a modest number took “vicarious satisfaction in imagining a Japanese (or German) invasion of the Southern states”; and he warned that if black grievances remained unredressed after the war, it was difficult to predict how they would react “if later a new war were to be fought more definitely along color lines.”38 Beginning in the 1930s, the Japanese did attempt to influence black opinion in the United States, but their efforts to this end were desultory and largely ineffective.

For Marshall, see Glen C. H. Perry, “Dear Bart”: Washington Views of World War II (1982: Greenwood Press), 184. Virginius Dabney, “Nearer and Nearer the Precipice,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1943, 94–100. 38. Roi Ottley, ‘New World A-Coming’: Inside Black America (1943: Houghton Mifflin), 341–42. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944: Harper & Row), 815, 1016, the opinion poll is in ibid., 1400. 39. On the Japanese ties to black militants, see Erdmann Benyon, “The Voodoo Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit,” American Journal of Sociology 43.6 (May 1938): esp 904; C.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

HISTORICAL ROOTS The protection of individual dignity has been an American ideal since our founding, even in the face of its blatant and categorical denial to African Americans and many others. Alexander Hamilton opens The Federalist Papers with the argument that the adoption of the Constitution “is the safest course for your liberty, your dignity, and your happiness.”16 Swedish philosopher Gunnar Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma identifies “the essential dignity of the individual” as integral to “the essential meaning of the nation’s early struggle for independence.”17 We can better understand the evolution of economic dignity in our history by seeing it as divided into two broad categories: “positive” and “negative” dignity.

., and Darrick Hamilton, “The Federal Job Guarantee—A Policy to Achieve Permanent Full Employment,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 9, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal-job-guarantee-a-policy-to-achieve-permanent-full-employment. 16. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 1,” October 27, 1787, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/federalist-no-1/. 17. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944). 18. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (lecture, 1958), Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, accessed November 10, 2019, http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/tcl/tcl-a.pdf. 19.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

Despite its ambition, the work failed to gain the attention Keynes had hoped for it. Keynes’s contemporary, Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), was a brilliant free market economist. Trained in Vienna, he was steeped in the orthodoxy of Walrasian economics but also aware of Wicksell’s work. Along with Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987), a socialist, who succeeded Gustav Cassel as professor at the University of Stockholm, he proposed an alternative approach. Later, Hayek and Myrdal, whose politics were poles apart, were to share the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 for “their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations.”


pages: 444 words: 138,781

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

“But if it is a question of taking a road past his property, he sees at once that this small public matter has a bearing on his greatest private interests.”2 It is only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, that we can become engaged citizens, dedicating our time and resources for worthwhile causes: joining the Neighborhood Watch, volunteering to beautify a playground, or running for school board. Working on behalf of the common good is the engine of democracy, vital to our communities, cities, states—and, ultimately, the nation. It is “an outflow of the idealism and moralism of the American people,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal.3 Some have called this impulse “love of country” or “patriotism” or the “American spirit.” But whatever its name, its foundation is the home. What else is a nation but a patchwork of cities and towns; cities and towns a patchwork of neighborhoods; and neighborhoods a patchwork of homes? America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community.

EPILOGUE: HOME AND HOPE 1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 13; with special thanks to Rowan Flad and Shamus Khan for etymology insights. 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 511. 3. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, vol. 2, The Negro Social Structure (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers, 1964 [1944]), 810. 4. Plato, The Republic (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), 312. I have changed “men” to “people.” 5. Mary Schwartz and Ellen Wilson, Who Can Afford to Live in a Home? A Look at Data from the 2006 American Community Survey (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2007). 6.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Nevertheless, the task has proven insurmountable almost everywhere outside of Asia—the most successful example of economic development the world has ever seen. Their success has been so strong—and they have been successful for so long—that it is easy to take it for granted. But Asia’s growth would have surprised many experts of the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal, who assessed Asia’s prospects as truly bleak.4 Conventional wisdom then was that countries such as Korea should stick to what they were best at: growing rice. The East Asian miracle shows that rapid development—and growth with equity, in which the poor and the rich both benefit—is possible, even though no particular preconditions were in place.

My own work added to the list of situations in which market failures lead to inefficiency—where information was imperfect and/or asymmetric (that is, where some individuals know something that others do not). Arrow and Debreu’s analysis also assumed that technology was unchanging, or at least unaffected by actions of market participants; yet changes in technology are at the center of development. 4.Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (New York: Pantheon, 1968). 5.Its performance in the past fifteen years has been a little bit better—a measly annual increase in per capita income of 0.2 percent. 6.See World Bank, China 2020: Development Challenges in the New Century (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997), p. 3; available at http://www-wds.world bank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/1997/09/01/000009265_398 0625172933/Rendered/PDF/multi0page.pdf. 7.Since 1970, the total (average annual rate of ) increase in income per capita has been: China, 923 percent (6.8 percent); Indonesia, 286 percent (4.0 percent); Korea, 566 percent (5.6 percent); Malaysia, 283 percent (3.9 percent); Thailand, 347 percent (4.4 percent).


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

Chou En-lai now devoted his energies to the Western powers, persuading Mao that they could be far more useful than Mao had realized. Meanwhile, the Communist base was strengthened financially through sales of opium, grown on 30,000 acres in Yenan and marketed in part through a Nationalist general to the north. This at least allowed Mao to ease up on the exploitation of the peasants. Later on, another considerable expert, Gunnar Myrdal, was to observe a village in that area, and to offer wide-eyed praise at the ‘traditions’ being observed. Mao had the grace to burst out laughing. He meanwhile built up his party (it now had over 700,000 members) and many were well-educated volunteers from the Nationalist areas as they arrived (40,000 of them) in Yenan.

Michael Harrington discovered that there were many poor Americans: The Other America (1962). David Riesman looked at the American rat race in The Lonely Crowd (1961) and shook his head at the two-dimensional misery of it all. René Dumont considered international aid, and thought that there should be much more of it; Gunnar Myrdal saw American race relations in the same light. Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch (1970) saying that for women life was a bitter picture from the cradle to the tomb. The answer was: spend money. Here, the presiding genius was Maynard Keynes. He had been contemptuous of the orthodox balance-the-budget financiers who had run things in the 1930s (and who were still running them in the 1950s): they reduced the National Debt and tried to run a budget surplus.

The question would have been accepted by any Communist in the 1930s: the peasants, Marx’s quadrupeds, would only accept progessive change if they were forced to. Modernization from the Left was a standard line, and was accepted very widely indeed. Since the Second World War a school of development economics had emerged, with the Swede Gunnar Myrdal in the lead, and its adepts were all around, whether in Africa or Latin America, arguing in effect that the peasantry and the small bourgeoisie should pay for heavy industrialization, courtesy of the State. But in 1976, by the time Mao Tsetung had died, that scheme of things looked much less promising.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

He made good on that promise by establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which ultimately produced a 178-page report advocating sweeping reforms. As a result, Truman issued the long-awaited ban on segregation in the military.116 In 1944, after studying race relations at the behest of the Carnegie Foundation, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published an unsparing account of white racism entitled An American Dilemma. The book’s emphatic message was that the time was ripe in America for an inevitable reckoning between the reality of discrimination and the “American Creed” of democratic equality. “Not since Reconstruction has there been more reason to anticipate fundamental changes in American race relations, changes which will involve a development toward American ideals,” Myrdal wrote, optimistically.117 The book was a best-seller and Myrdal’s analysis was well received by both African American and white intellectuals.

It was signed by leading researchers at the time in multiple academic disciplines. 115 Delton, Rethinking the 1950s, 97. 116 “Executive Order 9981: Establishing the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity In the Armed Forces,” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accessed November 22, 2019, https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/history/35th/thelaw/eo-9981.html. 117 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), Preface, xviiii. 118 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 386–87. 119 DC Editorial, “Superman: A Classic Message Restored,” DC, August 25, 2017, https://www.dccomics.com/blog/2017/08/25/superman-a-classic-message-restored. 120 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 386–87. 121 Quoted in ibid., 413. 122 According to Patterson (ibid.), at the end of Eisenhower’s administration, only 28 percent of Southern blacks could vote.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

And even in a period with emergency wage, price, and consumption controls, planning had a great deal of mystique. Despite Wigforss’s assurances about the continued role of private capital, the 1944 program advocated government takeovers of basic industries and finance and an overarching state responsibility for shaping investment and maintaining full employment. Economist and trade minister Gunnar Myrdal spoke of a “harvest time” for the labor movement, in which the fruits of recent economic development would fall to workers. Yet a push for nationalization found resistance from a capitalist class that could credibly threaten to withhold investment. That climate, combined with the onset of the Cold War, tempered the SAP, which forsook alliance with the Communists in favor of a new coalition with the Agrarians.10 With the march toward socialization blocked, the party eventually adopted a 1951 plan created by LO economists Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Speaking of Congo-Brazzaville, in most discussions of global development, sub-Saharan Africa is mentioned as some kind of a synonym for hopelessness. That was not always the case. In the 1960s, most African countries were richer and had higher growth than Asian countries, and were blessed with more natural resources. Economists such as Gunnar Myrdal believed more in Africa than Asia, where they worried that governments were not strong enough to push industrialization and Confucian attitudes were thought to block innovation and development. In 1967, the World Bank’s chief economist listed seven African economies that he thought could grow by more than 7 per cent annually.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

All of these elements tend to hang together within a geographical region in a mutually supportive way. If they do not cohere, then economic development within the region tends to languish. Regions that develop superior qualities become grand attractors for further capitalist activity. In this way, what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal dubbed ‘circular and cumulative causation’ operates to make rich and successful regions ever more prosperous, while poorer regions stagnate or decline. Regional configurations in divisions of labour and of production systems are, in short, made by the conjoining of economic and political forces rather than dictated by so-called natural advantages.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

I express my admiration and gratitude to all its members. I also have drawn from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, who, as far as I know, never used a computer to simulate a system, but who are natural systems thinkers. They include Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly, Albert Einstein, Garrett Hardin, Václav Havel, Lewis Mumford, Gunnar Myrdal, E.F. Schumacher, a number of modern corporate executives, and many anonymous sources of ancient wisdom, from Native Americans to the Sufis of the Middle East. Strange bedfellows, but systems thinking transcends disciplines and cultures and, when it is done right, it overarches history as well.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

In the 1960s and 1970s the Swedish author Lasse Berg and the photographer Stig Karlsson visited several Asian countries, documenting misery and warning about impending disaster. They had read what the experts had written about a hopeless continent, where they expected to find overpopulation, endless war and famines. They had learned from the economist Gunnar Myrdal, the authority on Asia in those days, that China was too chaotic to function, Malaysia had too much ethnic division and the South Koreans did not have a work ethic because of their religion. Berg and Karlsson saw what they expected to see, and thought that the worst was yet to come: ‘Doomsday was approaching, in one way or the other.’11 But in the 1990s they returned to the same places and villages and found a continent of hope.


pages: 998 words: 211,235

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

The prize is financed by the bank and administered by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. It is not, in fact, a Nobel Prize, but rather “The Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” To the public, that is a distinction without much of a difference. The early winners of the economics prize — among them Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Gunnar Myrdal — were generally acknowledged to be intellectual giants and lent their distinction to the prize. And, so far at least, it has become “the ultimate symbol of excellence for scientists and laymen alike” and does in fact make economics Nobel-ists “life peers in the world community of scholars.”10 The criteria, rules, and procedures for the economics prize are patterned after those that apply to the science prizes.11 Candidates must be living.

Top academic economists in Sweden, where academia, government, and industry have long been closely entwined, have traditionally wielded a great deal more political power than their American counterparts.16 Bertil Ohlin, the committee’s first chairman, was for years the leader of Sweden’s opposition. Gunnar Myrdal, who won the prize in 1974, was a minister in the Social Democratic government. Lindbeck himself was a protégé of Prime Minister Olof Palme, has held many political advisory posts, and has been involved in most public policy debates since the 1960s. Unlike Ohlin and Myrdal, Lindbeck never abandoned his research career to become a full-time politician.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, “Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away.”2 The phrase “triple revolution” referred to a report written by a group of prominent academics, journalists, and technologists that called itself the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. The group included Nobel laureate chemist Linus Pauling as well as economist Gunnar Myrdal, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, along with Friedrich Hayek, in 1974. Two of the revolutionary forces identified in the report—nuclear weapons and the civil rights movement—are indelibly woven into the historical narrative of the 1960s. The third revolution, which comprised the bulk of the document’s text, has largely been forgotten.


pages: 355 words: 63

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Hollis Chenery and Alan Strout wrote in the early 1960s that growth in India would exceed growth in Korea between 1962 and 1976. As it turned out, Korea grew three times faster than India over this period. Anotherdevelopmenteconomist in the early 1960s ranked East Asia below sub-Saharan Africa on “economic culture” and ”population pressure.” The economist Gunnar Myrdal fretted about future superstarSingapore’s ”potentially explosive problems,” including rapid population growth, which would lead to ”a mounting unemployment burden.”16 All that turned out to be explosively mounting in Singapore was GDP. Under an Evil Star 207 In Search of Excellence This failure to appreciate mean reversion in economicsis true at scales other than countries.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

One notable exception who continues to have an outsized influence was Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian-born economist who took up a post at the London School of Economics in 1931. Hayek was as much a social theorist and political philosopher as an economist. Despite his reliance on narrative argument over mathematical proof, he won the Nobel Prize, with Gunnar Myrdal, in 1974, for his “penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.” Hayek died in 1992. Others who also followed in the “more words than math” school include Albert Hirschman and Arthur Lewis. 9. Joseph Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). 10.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Uncertainty is key to generating such equilibria, with a fall in investment prospects producing a flight to liquidity rather than a fall in interest rates. There has always been a debate about whether a Keynesian equilibrium is anything more than a short-period phenomenon. Economists in the Keynesian tradition, including Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986), Gunnar Myrdal (1899–1987), George Shackle (1903–1992), Giovanni Dosi (b.1953), as well as many in the Austrian school, such as Ludwig Lachmann (1906–1990), have tried to break out of the straitjacket of equilibrium. Innovation is a fertile field for dynamic analysis. One can’t know in advance about the effects of innovation because it hasn’t yet happened.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Behind its crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables: the American underclass.” The Time article pointed out that the concept of “underclass,” first used in “class-ridden Europe,” was “applied to the U.S. by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and other intellectuals in the 1960s” and “has become a rather common description of people who are seen to be stuck more or less permanently at the bottom, removed from the American dream.” The article goes on to state: Though its members come from all races and live in many places, the underclass is made up mostly of impoverished urban blacks, who still suffer from the heritage of slavery and discrimination.… Their bleak environment nurtures values that are often at radical odds with those of the majority—even the majority of the poor.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

One of the reasons it took so long to write is that between 1969 and 1974 his progress had been interrupted by ill health and depression. However, two events were to revitalize him. The Nobel Prize in economics had been established in 1969. It was rumoured that the committee were keen to award the prize to Gunnar Myrdal, one of the pioneers of the Swedish welfare state, but it had been specified at inception that no Swede could win in the first five years. The sixth year was 1974, and Myrdal duly received the award that year. However, the prize was shared with Hayek. Both economists were reportedly surprised, Hayek because he had won; Myrdal because he had to share the award.18 Hayek had not considered himself a contender because his work in technical economics was too far in the past.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

The people most likely to lie—those living in liberal northern areas—also had the lowest rates of false beliefs.) This same dynamic, O’Gorman argued, helped explain why blacks couldn’t get hired: Even when white employers did not think of themselves as racist, they believed their customers were—so they went along with the crowd, or at least the crowd they imagined existed. O’Gorman quoted the economist Gunnar Myrdal’s interviews with white employers: “I have been told time and time again that they have nothing against employing Negroes, and I believe they are telling the truth. What holds them back are the considerations they have to take about the attitudes of customers and co-workers.” The same dynamic even appeared to govern playdates of children.


pages: 369 words: 121,161

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

It is a bitterly, and sometimes rousingly, complicated place, this land thrashing over such incessant contradictions as control and permissiveness, the radical young and the conservative middle, the limitlessness of civil rights and the limitations of presidential power. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal helped make sense of the constant commotion with his remark to the effect that, while the American tradition is a conservative one, what it has struggled to conserve are often very radical principles indeed. A still more timely reminder that the government of a free people is meant to be argued about comes from the most famous of American jurists.


pages: 425 words: 116,409

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

McClurg and Co., 1903). 109 the American dilemma: In 1944, the Carnegie Foundation funded a groundbreaking, comprehensive report on the state of black America, entitled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1946). Its author, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, pointed out the brutal circularity of a system that discriminated against blacks in virtually every aspect of their lives, then excoriated them when they failed to meet the marks set by whites. 109 answered Czarnecki’s greeting with a Mach 2 blowdown: Stradling, “Retired Engineer Remembers Segregated Langley.” 110 “Why don’t you come work for me?”


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement.9 There were many other advocates around this time, though most seem to have supported a means-tested guaranteed minimum income. They included a string of Nobel Prize-winning economists – James Meade, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Jan Tinbergen, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson and Gunnar Myrdal. The idea was also supported by other prominent economists, such as J. K. Galbraith, and by sociologists, most notably New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, although a Democrat, had a strong influence on Nixon’s proposed Family Assistance Plan.10 The fourth wave could be said to have started in a quiet way with the establishment of the Basic Income European (now Earth) Network (BIEN) in 1986.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The concentration of the media at that moment, in other words, provided activists with an Archimedean point of leverage: They could focus their energies on a relative handful of press outlets and through these outlets broadcast their message to almost every last member of the voting public. In some ways, the story told in The Race Beat bears out Julian Assange’s simple vision: The truth of the nature of segregation was exposed and the truth won. Roberts and Klibanoff quote Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who prophetically observed in his 1944 book that “there is no doubt that a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.” But key to this “truth” getting out was the concentrated authority that the establishment press at the time, particularly the New York Times, possessed.


pages: 443 words: 125,510

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, Clive Stafford Smith, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal world order, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs

He maintains that the United States was born a liberal country and never had a feudal tradition, unlike its European counterparts. Lacking a significant political right or left, it has instead veered toward an illiberal liberalism. But Hartz says little about American nationalism. In this he follows in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gunnar Myrdal, who also wrote important books on American identity that largely ignore nationalism.80 This was a “misleading orthodoxy,” as Rogers Smith points out in his important book Civic Ideals.81 American identity does not revolve only around liberalism, as Hartz seemed to think, but is inextricably bound up with nationalism.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India of filth; the blight, in an India that tries to grow, is also the over-all obedience it imposes, its ready-made satisfactions, the diminishing of adventuresomeness, the pushing away from men of individuality and the possibility of excellence.14 Gunnar Myrdal, in his great study of South Asian poverty, was left to conclude that overall, Indian religion constituted “a tremendous force for social inertia,” and nowhere acted as a positive agent for change in the way that Calvinism or Jodo Shinshu did.15 With examples like the Hindu sanctification of poverty in mind, most social scientists have assumed that religion was one of those aspects of “traditional culture” that would decline under the impact of industrialization.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Long-standing traditions of demonising the inhabitants of basements – or using the idea of basements pejoratively as social metaphor or allegory – find their counterparts in the way many discussions of the social, political or cultural ‘underworlds’ and ‘undergrounds’ of cities also gravitate to various forms of ‘basements’ terminology. In 1965, for example, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal coined the controversial term ‘underclass’ by directly invoking the allegory of the basement and the ‘basement class’ as the lowest of the low within a broader society. In a notorious book filled with clashing vertical metaphors and allegories, Myrdal argued that there was ‘an ugly smell rising from the basement of the stately mansion.’


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

When I began studying economics at Oxford during the early eighties, Hayek was widely seen as a right-wing nut. True, he had received the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1974, but that was viewed within the economics profession as a political sop, with Hayek’s name added to balance that of his co-winner, Gunnar Myrdal, a left-wing Swedish economist. (Myrdal later said that he wouldn’t have accepted the award if he had known he would have to share it with Hayek.) Hayek’s proposals to emasculate the trade unions and privatize the money supply seemed outlandish: he was regarded more as a libertarian political philosopher than a practical economist.


A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

And ISI received dozens of such visitors. Many of them came because of Mahalanobis’s energy, his mania for inviting the best minds in the world to his corner of eastern India. (Or even those not quite among the best. “Every second-rate economist from Europe or America” must have come to ISI in the 1950s, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal declared.) But many also came because in the years after India became free, the institute turned into a regular waystation for the politicians who came to court this new nation. Lyndon Johnson made the trip; so did Alexei Kosygin, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Henry Kissinger, and Zhou Enlai. For Nehru, the institute sat at the focus of his centralized plan to build his country.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Computers were designed to perform cognitive tasks. (Think of Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings’s nemesis, IBM’s Watson.) Theoretically, there was no limit to the kinds of work computers might eventually perform. In 1964 several eminent intellectuals, including the past and future Nobel laureates Linus Pauling and Gunnar Myrdal, wrote President Lyndon Johnson to warn him about “a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor.” Such a dystopia may yet one day emerge. But thus far traditional economic theory is holding up reasonably well.7 Computers are eliminating jobs, but they’re also creating jobs.


pages: 740 words: 227,963

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, card file, cotton gin, desegregation, Ford Model T, Gunnar Myrdal, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, labor-force participation, Mason jar, mass immigration, medical residency, Rosa Parks, strikebreaker, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Works Progress Administration

The unequal living conditions produced the expected unequal results: blacks working long hours for overpriced flats, their children left unsupervised and open to gangs, the resulting rise in crime and drugs, with few people able to get out and the problems so complex as to make it impossible to identify a single cause or solution. King was running headlong into what the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the Northern Paradox. In the North, Myrdal wrote, “almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs”—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.186 “It is the culmination of all these personal discriminations,” he continued, “which creates the color bar in the North, and, for the Negro, causes unusually severe unemployment, crowded housing conditions, crime and vice.

REVOLUTIONS 184 I can conceive: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 59. 185 “Negroes have continued”: James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 35. 186 “almost everybody is against”: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), p. 1010. 187 “So long as this city”: “White and Black in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1919, p. F6. The editorial also said, “We admit frankly that if political equality had meant the election of Negro mayors, judges, and a majority of the city council, the whites would not have tolerated it.


pages: 535 words: 103,761

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

Gaining control over the socialisation of the young was the ambition of many professionals. This goal was most forcefully pursued by Social Democratic governments in Sweden, which from the 1930s onwards sought to turn socialisation into a responsibility of the state. The Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, and his partner, the politician and social scientist Alva Myrdal, developed a social democratic, social engineering paradigm that sought not only to direct the socialisation of young people but also to use children to assist the project of re-socialising their parents. Their objective was to create a universal system of nurseries and after-school care to facilitate the realisation of their objective of neutralising the influence of parents over their children.


pages: 621 words: 157,263

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, public intellectual, Simon Kuznets, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

This was perhaps least marked in economics, where Marxists had always been peripheral, though among the first ten Nobel laureates in this field there were three who were formed or partly formed in the early years of the Soviet Union or who were still active there (Wassily Leontief, Simon Kuznets, Leonid Kantorovitch). However, from 1974, when Friedrich von Hayek received the prize, still balanced by his ideological opposite, the Swede Gunnar Myrdal, and 1976, when it was given to Milton Friedman, it became markedly identified with a sharp turn away from Keynesian and other interventionist theories and a return to an increasingly uncompromising laissez-faire. Cracks in this prevailing consensus did not begin to appear until the late l990s.


pages: 452 words: 150,785

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street by John Brooks

banking crisis, belling the cat, Bretton Woods, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Ford paid five dollars a day, Gunnar Myrdal, invention of the wheel, large denomination, lateral thinking, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, short selling, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, very high income

Now the offers were coming so fast that little attempt was made to disguise their places of origin; it was evident that they were coming from everywhere—chiefly from the financial centers of Europe, but also from New York, and even from London itself. Rumors of imminent devaluation were sweeping the bourses of the Continent. And in London itself an ominous sign of cracking morale appeared: devaluation was now being mentioned openly even there. The Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, in a luncheon speech in London on Thursday, had suggested that a slight devaluation might now be the only possible solution to Britain’s problems; once this exogenous comment had broken the ice, Britons also began using the dread word, and, in the next morning’s Times, Our City Editor himself was to say, in the tone of a commander preparing the garrison for possible surrender, “Indiscriminate gossip about devaluation of the pound can do harm.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

{523} Michael Cabanatuan, “Bay Bridge Pause Cost $81 Million,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 8, 2005, p. B1. {524} Caroline E. Mayer, “Personal Bankruptcy Filings Fall Sharply,” Washington Post, November 22, 2005, p. D3. {525} Melvyn B. Krauss, Development Without Aid (New York: The Free Press, 1983), p. 30. {526} Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (New York: Pantheon, 1968), Volume II, p. 832. {527} Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Thunder from the East (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 257. {528} Rose Brady, Kapitalizm: Russia’s Struggle to Free Its Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 7

{954} The Urban Institute, The NonProfit Sector in Brief: Public Charities, Giving, and Volunteering, 2013 (Washington: Urban Institute, 2013), p. 2. {955} Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 111. {956} Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 718. {957} Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem & Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), Volume I, p. 323; Harold J. Laski, The American Democracy (New York: Viking Press, 1948), p. 480. {958} “Talented Black Scholars Whom No White University Would Hire,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Winter 2003–2004, pp. 110–115


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

This is why the simple people loved them.60 EVEN IN SCANDINAVIA? World-systems theory argues that global capitalism produces similar patterns of social development in whichever countries it touches. André Gunder-Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, and to some extent Swedish academics like Gösta Esping-Andersen and Gunnar Myrdal have accepted this logic. Sweden has always seemed to be different in Europe. It is one of the rare countries that has no national holiday to celebrate. It is among the highestranked states in the world in a number of key indicators of “progressiveness”: quality of life, human development, postmaterialist values, empowerment of women, absence of corruption, and environmental regulation.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Irvine, The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France (New York, 1989), is a fascinating guide to the promptings of fascism in late nineteenth-century France. Carol A. Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (New York, 2005), offers an insightful account of anti-immigration solidarity in the United States. It is worth returning to the original contention that racism could be a form of democracy: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols (New York, 1944). On Tocqueville and Algeria, see Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, 2003). Marinetti’s pronouncements can be sampled in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, ed.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

.* The school emphasized the importance of understanding the history of how the material production system has changed, both influencing and influenced by law and other social institutions.12 The Developmentalist tradition in the modern world: Development Economics The Developmentalist tradition was advanced in its modern form in the 1950s and the 1960s by economists such as, in alphabetical order, Albert Hirschman (1915–2012), Simon Kuznets (1901–85), Arthur Lewis (1915–91) and Gunnar Myrdal (1899–87) – this time, under the rubric of Development Economics. Writing mostly about the countries on the periphery of capitalism in Asia, Africa and Latin America, they and their followers not only refined the earlier Developmentalist theories but also added quite a lot of new theoretical innovations.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

LANGUAGES OF GOOD AND EVIL 1Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 4-5. 2Ian Jamieson, Capitalism and Culture: A Comparative Analysis of British and American Manufacturing Organizations (London: Gower, 1980), p. 9. 3Geertz in fact goes further than this and asserts that there is no such thing as “human nature,” that is, a set of characteristics common to all human beings. He argues that human beings developed cultures before they had stopped evolving biologically, so what human beings are “by nature” is in good measure determined by the cultures they adopt. Geertz (1973), pp. 34-35; 49. 4Geertz (1973), p. 89. 5For a discussion of cows in India, see Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1968), 1: 89-91. 6Nichomachean Ethics Book II i.8. Aristotle explains that for people to be truly virtuous, they must habituate themselves to virtuous behavior such that it becomes a kind of second nature that is pleasurable in itself, or if not pleasurable something that the virtuous man takes pride in.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

On the West Coast, where the black population had been relatively small before the war, the rise was even more spectacular. The number of African Americans rose 78 percent in Los Angeles, 227 percent in the San Francisco Bay area, and 438 percent in metropolitan Portland.36 In 1944 the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal titled his study of race in the United States The American Dilemma. At the close of World War II, it was becoming more specifically an urban dilemma. The move to the city, however, did not free African Americans from the long-standing restraints of racial segregation and discrimination. In southern cities, they were required to sit at the back of streetcars and buses, the front being reserved for whites.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

The disagreement is around whether aid can remedy poverty, rather than merely respond to crises. Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get them freedom to exchange and specialise, so that prosperity can evolve? Friedrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 for answering this question in opposite ways. Hayek thought that individual rights and freedoms were the means by which societies escaped from poverty. Myrdal thought development would be ‘largely ineffective’ without ‘regulations backed by compulsion’, because a ‘largely illiterate and apathetic citizenry’ would achieve nothing without government direction.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

As much as African Americans complained of violence perpetrated by white terrorists, the lack of legal protection from everyday neighbor-on-neighbor violence was never then, and has never been, far from their minds. “Law-abiding Negroes point out that there are criminal and treacherous Negroes who secure immunity from punishment because they are fawning and submissive toward whites,” observed the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal in his famous 1944 book about race in America, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. “Such persons are a danger to the Negro community. Leniency toward Negro defendants in cases involving crimes against other Negroes is thus actually a form of discrimination.” Crime within the black community was primarily seen as a black problem, and became a societal problem mainly when it seemed to threaten the white population.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

One of the reasons it took so long to write is that between 1969 and 1974 his progress had been interrupted by ill health and depression. However, two events were to revitalize him. The Nobel Prize in economics had been established in 1969. It was rumoured that the committee were keen to award the prize to Gunnar Myrdal, one of the pioneers of the Swedish welfare state, but it had been specified at inception that no Swede could win in the first five years. The sixth year was 1974, and Myrdal duly received the award that year. However, the prize was shared with Hayek. Both economists were reportedly surprised, Hayek because he had won; Myrdal because he had to share the award.18 Hayek had not considered himself a contender because his work in technical economics was too far in the past.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Pressure came in part from the Left in the form of an open letter to the president from a group that called itself the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, including Democratic Socialists of America head Michael Harrington, Students for a Democratic Society cofounder Tom Hayden, biologist Linus Pauling, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, pacifist A. J. Muste, economic historian Robert Heilbroner, social critic Irving Howe, civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, and Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, among many others. The first revolution they noted was the emergence of the “Cybernation”: “A new era of production has begun.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

In 1937, Bunche joined the Council on African Affairs, an organization founded by the activist Max Yergan to lobby the US government on workers’ rights and independence movements in Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois, the activist and performer Paul Robeson and the politician Adam Clayton Powell were fellow members of the council. An Africa analyst for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, Bunche worked with the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal on An American Dilemma (1944), a widely read sociological study of race and racism and a scholarly boost to the civil rights movement.6 Bunche put parts of Locke’s new foreign policy into practice. He became the US ambassador to the United Nations in 1950, reviving a tradition of African American diplomatic distinction from the Civil War to the First World War that the astringent racial dynamics of the 1920s had derailed.


pages: 742 words: 202,902

The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by Jim Rasenberger

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Gunnar Myrdal, Kitchen Debate, land reform, Neil Armstrong, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, Torches of Freedom, William of Occam

Canceling the operation would have exposed him to enormous political risks. At the same time, approving the use of military force to bail it out would have exposed him and the country to unacceptable diplomatic risks, and possibly worse. Walt Rostow later recounted a conversation he had with Swedish economist and future Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal, who happened to be in Washington the spring after the Bay of Pigs. Myrdal told Rostow he worked for a “great president.” When Rostow asked him why, he responded, “If Kennedy had called it off, he would have been ruined politically at home.… But if he had engaged American forces to salvage a failing covert operation, he would have been ruined abroad.”


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Over the years, there had been plenty of Western experts who thought the Indian conglomerates would gradually fade away, to be replaced by a more orthodox Anglo-Saxon model, with diffuse corporate ownership and clear splits between managers and shareholders. But for all their frequency, these predictions never actually seemed to come to pass. There were plenty of cultural and historical theories to explain the conglomerates’ successes, but mostly it came down to what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal once called India’s “soft state.”16 Western companies could raise capital through financial markets, and rely on the state to build good quality infrastructure. They also hired graduates from good universities and used the courts to settle disputes. In India, all of this was different: capital was expensive, infrastructure dilapidated, talent scarce, and the judicial system typically creaky and unreliable.17 Many businesses decided they needed to do these things themselves.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Meade UK 1977 Trade theory Robert C. Merton USA 1997 Finance theory Merton H. Miller USA 1990 Finance theory James A. Mirrlees UK 1996 Asymmetric information Franco Modigliani USA 1985 Macroeconomics and finance theory Robert A. Mundell Canada 1999 Exchange rates and currency areas Gunnar Myrdal Sweden 1974 Economic systems John F. Nash Jr. USA 1994 Game theory Douglass C. North USA 1993 Application of economic theory to economic history Bertil Ohlin Sweden 1977 Trade theory Paul A. Samuelson USA 1970 "For the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science."


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The Nobel rescued his reputation from desuetude. For Hayek, the prize money freed him from a dependence on the welfare state for costly medical treatment and lifted his spirits in a time of despair. Given the surprising conferral, reactions were intense. His fellow recipient, the Swedish theorist Gunnar Myrdal, believed the Hayek award demeaned the prize. It pointed to the partisan tendencies of the key figure on the selection committee, Assar Lindbeck, a staunch opponent of social democracy and an advocate of Hayek’s philosophy. Lindbeck’s intervention on the Nobel committee ushered in a more ideological phase in the prize’s history, during which neoliberal economists, many associated with the MPS, received a large number of the prizes.


pages: 407 words: 135,242

pages: 537 words: 200,923

City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Annunziato, “Made in New Haven,” Labor Heritage 4 (Winter 1992). 65. Montgomery, “160 Years,” 23. 66. Labor Almanac, 50. CHAPTER 8. RACE, PLACE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF SPATIAL HIERARCHY 1. In general, black wages in the north ran 20 –45 percent above black southern levels, and quite commonly exceeded southern white wage levels. See, among other sources, Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper & Row, 1944). In appendix 6, Myrdal gives data for several industries, broken down by wage and region for the late 1930s. For example, in iron and steel working, we have the following average hourly wages for 1937: northern blacks $.74, southern blacks $.54, northern whites $.86, southern whites $.75.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Several studies also suggest that higher skills are in demand, although not in shortage, but higher skills do not necessarily translate into higher wages.137 Thus, in the US, while decline in real wages was more pronounced for the lowest-educated, salaries for the college-educated also stagnated between 1987 and 1993.138 The direct consequence of economic restructuring in the United State s is that in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s family income plummeted. Wages and living conditions continued to decline until 1996 in spite of a strong economic recovery in 1993.139 Furthermore, half a century after Gunnar Myrdal pointed to the “American Dilemma,” Martin Carnoy, in a powerful book, documented that racial discrimination continues to increase social inequality, contributing to marginalizing a large proportion of America’s ethnic minorities.140 However, in 1996–2000, the sustained boom led by information technology and the new economy changed the trend, and increased average real wages at about 1.2 percent per year.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Burnham, “The Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee: Cultural Pluralism and the Struggle for Black Advancement,” in Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820–1970, ed. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 258–79. The notion that integration was a solution to America’s racial “dilemma” was most forcefully articulated by Gunnar Myrdal, American Dilemma (New York: Harper, 1944). 15. Schermer, “The Transitional Housing Area,” 5–6. 16. Walter White, “How Detroit Fights Race Hatred,” Saturday Evening Post, July 18, 1953, 26–27; “Buyer Beware,” Time, April 16, 1956, 24; “Prejudice is Not Sectional,” Christian Century, April 18, 1956, 477; “A Northern City Sitting on the Lid of Racial Trouble,” U.S.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Taney’s—that Black people were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”13 AT THE END OF World War II, all indications were that a combination of de jure and de facto discrimination against Black Americans would continue indefinitely to prevent them from attaining education, climbing out of poverty, and building wealth. The economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal entitled his 1944 book on race and America An American Dilemma—the dilemma being the inconsistency between an “American creed” of equality of opportunity and the actual position of Blacks in America. There seemed to be no reason why the country could not live with this dilemma indefinitely. The Republican Party retained a vestigial commitment to Black uplift as part of its belief in “free labor.”


pages: 741 words: 199,502

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

Econometrics and psychometrics were already established disciplines, but for the most part social scientists wrote narratives with simple descriptive statistics. Some of those narratives had deservedly become classics—for example, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro, Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, and Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma—but social scientists were powerless to analyze causation or make predictions in quantitative ways except with small samples in psychology laboratories working with rats and pigeons. The multivariate statistical techniques for dealing with larger and messier problems of human society had been invented, but the computational burdens were too great.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Samuelsonian thought describes modern economists of the so-called mainstream—modeling exclusively with “constrained maximization,” in which the only virtue acknowledged is prudence.9 Not every worthy economist is Samuelsonian. An embattled countersquad of economic thinkers, with quite varied politics, has in the twentieth century included Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, John Maynard Keynes, John H. Clapham, Frank Knight, Eli Heckscher, Gunnar Myrdal, Antonio Gramsci, Luigi Einaudi, Joan Robinson, Kenneth Boulding, Ronald Coase, Paul Sweezy, Alexander Gerschenkron, John Kenneth Galbraith, George Shackle, Robert Heilbroner, Theodore Schultz, Albert Hirschman, Bert Hoselitz, Bruno Leoni, Noel Butlin, James Buchanan, Thomas Schelling, Robert Fogel, Amartya Sen, Elinor Ostrom, Israel Kirzner, and Vernon Smith.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War