Gunnar Myrdal Quotes

It Is in the Agricultural Sector That the Battle for Long- Term Economic Development Will Be Won or Lost.

The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well-off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery almost without noticing them.

The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes ... in drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes, we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture.

There is apparently nowhere a workable majority in the representative assemblies for making the specific cuts in expenditure which could bring down the taxes, and in election after election the people vote into power representatives who are as unable as they are unwilling to do anything about it.

So many social changes are as irreversible as the reaction when sodium is thrown into water.

Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.

Social taboos are shy like virtue; once lost, there is no remedy

America is conservative in fundamental principles... but the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical.

As a forecaster, Marx shared the common destiny of all prophets: to be belied by events.

Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields.

Planned parenthood" in the social history of the Western countries is, indeed, a phenomenon instrin-sically related to those very changes in peoples attitudes which, on the political plane, have been causing the trend towards economic planning.

The short-term international capital market is shrunken and erratic, and cannot be relied upon to cushion the effects of tendencies to disequilibrium in the balance of payments.

Language, as we know, is full of illogicalities.

Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.

Sometimes it looks as if, the better off they [nations] become, the bigger do they conceive the gap between what is actually their lot and what would be desirable, while in the poor countries large masses of people seem to be satisfied by merely surviving.

People become less inhibited from wanting to change social and economic conditions in a radical fashion according to their own interests, and from being prepared to think of state intervention in ever wider spheres as possible and useful for this purpose.

It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism.

Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by Governments lacking courage and vision.

It is natural for the ordinary American when he sees something wrong to feel not only that there should be a law against it but, also that an organization should be formed to combat it.

All sudden and violent changes, whatever their causes or character, must tend to decrease the respect for status quo as a natural order of things.

In most circles, the idea of economic planning has been in disrepute most of the time and, particularly in America, has almost carried connotations of intellectual and moral perversion and even political subversion.

America has had gifted conservative statesmen and national leaders. But with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes.

In the United States, and to only slightly lesser degree in all the other rich and economically progressive Western countries, public debate has at all times been dominated by the adherents of a "free" economy.