Abstract
This chapter provides an account of Gunnar Myrdal’s most famous work, An American Dilemma, published in 1944. This book analyzed the race problem in the United States. In this book, Myrdal turned his early use of cumulative causation into a coherent, concerted endeavor to prove that black poverty was not a purely economic phenomenon. It was caused by the interaction of white prejudice and discrimination and black economic, social and moral standards. When he wrote his book, he had become firmly convinced that all aspects of society mattered. There were no purely economic, social or political problems, only problems which involved all aspects of society, variables which interacted and which were intimately related to the existing institutions which performed economic and social functions and determined the actions of the individual actors. The book rested on the use of explicit value premises, the ‘American Creed’: democracy, equality, freedom, fair opportunity and the rule of law, principles shared by all Americans, but principles that were violated in the treatment of blacks by whites. Myrdal’s remedy amounted to social engineering and planning of society. The chapter also tells the story of the practical impact of An American Dilemma on American legislation and of the follow-up made by Myrdal in Challenge to Affluence in 1962.
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Notes
- 1.
Myrdal (1944a).
- 2.
Jackson (1990, p. xiii).
- 3.
Keppel (1944, p. vi).
- 4.
Myrdal’s own account of the work with the book is found in Myrdal (1987), a book dictated during the last years of his life. For a brilliant scholarly account of the history of An American Dilemma, see Jackson (1990).
- 5.
Myrdal (1944a, pp. x–xi).
- 6.
Several were published as books, most notably the one by the social anthropologist Melville Herskovits (1941).
- 7.
Myrdal (1987, p. 29).
- 8.
Myrdal (1944a).
- 9.
Barber (2008, p. 74).
- 10.
Jackson (1990, p. 1).
- 11.
Ibid., pp. 2–3.
- 12.
Myrdal (1944a, p. 205).
- 13.
Jackson (1990, p. 220).
- 14.
Myrdal (1944a, p. xlvii).
- 15.
Ibid., p. l.
- 16.
Ibid., p. li.
- 17.
Sterner (1971, p. 56).
- 18.
Myrdal (1944a, p. li).
- 19.
Ibid., p. liii.
- 20.
Jackson (1990, p. 186).
- 21.
Myrdal (1944a, Appendix 1 and 2).
- 22.
Ibid., p. 1048.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 1058.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 1035.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 1040.
- 26.
The notion permeates the entire book. See, however, especially ibid., Appendix 3.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 208.
- 28.
Myrdal (1978a, pp. 773–74).
- 29.
Ibid., p. 775.
- 30.
Gunnar Myrdal used the notion in other contexts as well. In 1941, he and Alva reported home in a book about the American society (Myrdal and Myrdal 1941). The idea behind the book was to present a society which most Swedes were ignorant about, and they did a good job. The book also reveals an interest in poverty and social issues, manifested above all in a lengthy account of American social policy and its change over time. This is not the place to go into any details, but let us notice a single sentence in the book: ‘Social contexts are always cumulative’ (ibid., p. 93). Later, this idea is applied to the problem of why the labor union movement was so weak in the US. Myrdal’s answer is that it was weak because it is weak, in a circular fashion. The union movement was weak because the political labor movement was weak and vice versa (ibid., pp. 227–28).
- 31.
Myrdal (1944a, pp. 75–76).
- 32.
Ibid., p. 1066.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 34.
As Trevor Swan (1962) later demonstrated, the process is not necessarily cumulative (unstable). It may as well converge to a stable equilibrium. For the cumulative process to arise, white prejudices must be sufficiently sensitive to change in black living standards and vice versa. The situation may be depicted in a diagram with black standards on the y-axis and white prejudices on the x-axis. Swan draws two linear reaction curves: aa (the reaction of black standards to a change in white prejudices) and bb (the reaction of white prejudices to a change in black standards) and shows that for the unstable situation to arise the bb line must cut the aa curve from below. This describes the situation where a single equilibrium exists. Swan, however, considers that situation unrealistic (ibid., pp 424–25):
The unstable equilibrium case – bb cutting aa from below – seems too unstable to serve even as a ‘simplified’ mental model’ for many purposes. The slightest breeze can puff Uncle Tom’s cabin either into the heaven of White brotherhood or into the limbo of extinction. The stable case – bb cutting aa from above – seems too stable. Only a permanent shift in the structure of social forces can change the equilibrium point. Is there no counterpart in the model for our instinctive feeling that an initial ‘explosion’ of some kind – a war or depression, a rape or a lynching – may disrupt a pre-existing stable equilibrium and lead to an entirely new social situation?
Swan suggests that there may be limiting factors that work to stop cumulation (ibid., p. 425):
When the Negroes (on the average) approach the standards of the Whites, some of the latter grow jealous and any further improvement in Negro standards causes little reduction of White prejudice, and may even cause it to increase; on the other hand, when the Negroes are very poor the White stomach for prejudice is satiated and perhaps compassion is aroused.
If similar limiting factors are present in the black community as well, the aa curve, looked at from the y-axis, may be S-shaped and the bb curve looked at from the x-axis may have the shape of an inverted S. Then the two curves twist around each other and produce a situation with three equilibrium points. In the high one, white prejudices are weak and black standards high. In the low one, white prejudices are strong and black standards are low. These two points are stable equilibria. Any departures from them will generate reactions that bring the system back to the original equilibrium. The intermediate point, with mid-level white prejudices and black standards, on the other hand, is unstable. Any departure from it will send the system either to the high-level or low-level equilibrium.
This, in turn, has consequences for the possibility of using social engineering. Using the undesirable low-level equilibrium, as the starting point, the first one consists in finding measures that lift the aa curve until the unstable equilibrium point is converted into a point of tangency between the two curves. In that case, the system becomes stable downwards, but unstable upwards, which allows for measures that lead to a cumulative upward movement until the desired high-level equilibrium point is reached. The second case assumes that the curves are unchanged. This requires a push which is big enough to move the system all the way from the unstable equilibrium to the stable high-level point. According to Swan, the multiple equilibrium situation constitutes a much better description of the real world than Myrdal’s original suggestion in An American Dilemma.
- 35.
Sterner (1971, pp. 58–59).
- 36.
Myrdal (1944a, p. 383).
- 37.
Jackson (1990, pp. 89, 106).
- 38.
Ibid., p. 132.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 77.
- 40.
Myrdal (1943a, b), respectively.
- 41.
Myrdal (1944a, p. xix).
- 42.
Ibid., p. 1021.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 1022.
- 44.
Jackson (1990, p. xi).
- 45.
Barber (2008, p. 64).
- 46.
Sowell (2011, p. 443).
- 47.
Ibid., p. 445.
- 48.
Myrdal kept coming back to this issue. Space limitations do not permit any exhaustive investigation here. However, his opening address at the Conference of the British Sociological Association in 1953 (Myrdal 1958) summarizes much of his thought on the issue. There he traced the changes in the position of the social sciences vis-à-vis policy making: the relation of social theory to social policy. Before the First World War, the social scientists ‘were neither the final authors nor the executors of social policy’ (ibid., p. 15). They were confined to academia, which, according to Myrdal, they developed rapidly. Their influence on social policy was due to their exposition of their thoughts and theories. With time, however, notably with the Great Depression, their role changed (ibid., p. 24):
In the institutional setup of modern democracy … a function most important for its survival and growth falls on the social scientists: the long-range intellectual leadership thrusting society forward to overcome primitive impulses and prejudices and to move in the direction of rationality. Our independent status should not be merely a personal pleasantness and distinction; it should be used as a basis for exerting influence over the development of the thinking of the general public which fixes the limits to the freedom of the journalists, awards conditional power to the politicians and allows them to decide upon the policies which set the frame for the craftsmanship of the civil servants.
Myrdal explicitly refers to the social scientists as ‘engineers of social policy’, a function which he expected to grow more important in the future (ibid., p. 25). This, he stated, would serve to break down the borders between the traditional disciplines, since real-world problems did not accept such boundaries. He also cautioned against the feedback upon the social sciences themselves. The scientists risked bring coopted, and possibly corrupted, by the political power structures and their academic freedom risked being impaired.
- 49.
Jackson (1990, p. 187).
- 50.
Ibid., p. 310. For extensive accounts of the reception of An American Dilemma in the United States, see Southern (1987) and Jackson (1990).
- 51.
‘… the tremendous amount of writing about race in the two decades after the Dilemma’s publication is intimidating’ (Southern 1987, p. 189).
- 52.
Ibid., p. 128.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 127.
- 54.
Jackson (1990, p. 124).
- 55.
Southern (1987, p. 189).
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Myrdal (1944a, p. 928) had argued that ‘American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture, It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture’, and he assumed that it was to the advantage of blacks, both as individuals and as a group to be assimilated into the culture of the dominant white group. This amounted to a misunderstanding of black American culture and its expression. ‘With respect to jazz, for example, Myrdal was tone-deaf’ (Barber 2008, p. 81). He was a square who played the lute (Andersson 1989, note, p. 16). Had he been hip he would not have missed Billie Holiday’s rendition of Strange Fruit, written by the Jewish school teacher Abel Meeropol, a song about lynching, recorded in 1939 for the legendary Commodore label:Verse
Verse Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees …
The story of the song is told in Margolick (2000). The tune is available, e.g., on Classic 601: Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra 1939–1940.
- 58.
Jackson (1990, p. 310).
- 59.
Southern (1987, p. 236).
- 60.
Myrdal (1962b).
- 61.
Ibid., p. 34.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 37.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 64.
Ibid., p. 43.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 44.
- 66.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 67.
Ibid., pp. 64–65.
- 68.
Ibid., p. 83.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 84.
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Lundahl, M. (2021). An American Dilemma . In: The Dynamics of Poverty. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73347-6_4
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