Milestones

DIED. Gunnar Myrdal, 88, combative Nobel-prizewinning Swedish social economist whose 1944 report, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a landmark study of U.S. race relations, was cited by the Supreme Court in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) that separate schools for blacks are unconstitutional; in Stockholm. In 1968 his massive ten-year study, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, maintained that land reform would wipe out Third World poverty. Myrdal was awarded a Nobel medal for economics in 1974. He and his wife Alva, who died in 1986, four years after being named a Nobel Peace laureate for her tireless advocacy of nuclear disarmament, helped design the Swedish welfare state. Nonetheless, Gunnar Myrdal in 1980 charged that excessive taxation was "turning Swedes into a gang of hustlers." A man of perplexing contradictions, he wrote early in his career, "Human beings are good; we can improve conditions through reforms," but later decided, "The world is going to hell in every possible way."