Abstract
The chapter surveys Gunnar Myrdal’s approach to the study of poverty. It begins with an account of how he gradually developed his methodology through a series of works dating from the late 1920s and early 1930s and continues with how he applied it to the population issue in Sweden, the racial problem in the United States, in An American Dilemma, in his analysis of international inequalities in the 1950s, and the issue of poverty in South Asia, in Asian Drama, from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. Myrdal’s analysis rests on some or all of the following elements: dynamic analysis; circular, cumulative causation; institutionalism; explicit value premises; and social engineering. There is no factor that is more important than others as the cause of poverty, but Myrdal works with a social system where all the elements that integrate the system influence and are influenced by each other. When one of them begins to move in a certain direction, the others will do so too and in the process reinforce the impact of the rest. In order to break out of poverty, political intervention is needed-social engineering-and this must rest on explicitly stated value judgments as to the desired goals and means. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Mats Lundahl, Daniel Rauhut, and Neelambar Hatti; individual chapters, the contributors.