From Welfare World to Global Poverty

Simon Reid-Henry

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,

and Development, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2017, pp. 207-226 (Review)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2017.0015

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/650956

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
 Simon Reid-Henry

From Welfare World to Global Poverty

The Challenge of World Poverty: A World

Anti-Poverty Program in Outline
Gunnar Myrdal
New York: Pantheon Books, 1970

Eric Hobsbawm famously described the twentieth century, and lived it, as an Age of
Extremes. Gunnar Myrdal, who lived that century no less than Hobsbawm, writing
his first piece in 1919 and his last in 1984, offered a different perspective on the era.
Where Hobsbawm painted a century of division and violence, wrought primarily
between West and East, Myrdal’s was a century divided between the haves and the
have-nots: in which inequality, not violence, was the primary key and north-south the
principal geographical register.1 Much like Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, Myrdal’s The
Challenge of World Poverty reads today almost as a valedictory statement on that
century. Unlike Hobsbawm, however, who took his Marxism confidently with him to
the global scale, Myrdal appears to have become less sure, over time, about the interna-
tional political inferences to draw from his social democratic politics.
Published in 1970, The Challenge of World Poverty arose, as did so many of
Myrdal’s books, from an invitation: this time to deliver the Herter Lectures at the
School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. Myrdal was only too
happy to accept the invitation to Johns Hopkins. Just two years before he had
published his second magnum opus, Asian Drama. And while there had been some
(perhaps wildly) positive reviews, there was also plenty of criticism. Myrdal himself
felt that the book had been “misunderstood.” The Challenge of World Poverty was his
opportunity to clarify.
But what Myrdal ended up doing was something rather different. The book’s
aspirations for a more just global order are in many ways the same as those Myrdal
outlined twenty years earlier, at the moment he first began to study the poor countries
in earnest. The tools (with some exceptions) are the same too. But the world of
“embedded liberalism” in which these were first launched was at this very moment
falling in about him: the end of fixed currency exchange rates, the OPEC oil shock,
and the gathering storm of the New International Economic Order, for example, were
all at this point amassing just over the horizon. This was to profoundly impact on the
possible means of global equality, as Myrdal had furnished them over the years, in a
way that he now struggled and ultimately failed to adapt to.2 Whatever the book was
that Myrdal had originally imagined, therefore, The Challenge of World Poverty soon
became much more than the stated “missing eighth part” of Asian Drama: the
suggested policy recommendations that he had simply not had space to include in

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 that “unwieldy” publication of 2,221 pages.3 It became, for some decades at least, the
story of a death foretold.4
If The Challenge of World Poverty bears the marks of a world in transition, Myrdal’s
last major work also bears the imprint of its author’s unique intellectual geography.
Myrdal was one of the original “young Turks” of Swedish social democracy, and he
carried over into his first writings on American and international politics the political
lessons of his youth. Not for nothing was he referred to in 1969 on PBS’s Firing Line
broadcast with William F. Buckley as that “sanctimonious Swede who has been paid
well for telling us what’s wrong with our country for a generation now.”5 By his later
years, however, Myrdal had also absorbed to a greater degree the liberal international
thinking prominent among the policy milieu he sought most consistently to influence
in America. As Raymond Aron once noted, Myrdal was the only European really able
to take part in the American domestic debate on equal terms with the Americans, and
Myrdal himself thought of America as his “spiritual fatherland.”6 This dialectic
between American-style liberal internationalism and Swedish national social
democracy was ultimately to structure a very basic tension at the heart of Myrdal’s
mature writing, and resolving it—as he sought to do in this book—would again take
him far off the range staked out by Asian Drama.7 Here too The Challenge of World
Poverty emerges as a work that escapes its own, feted genealogy.
“Facts kick,” as Myrdal once wrote. And yet the central fact of Myrdal’s own last
major work is that, in the end, it resolutely failed to provide the “social manifesto for
our times” that he intended (20). Of all Myrdal’s books, The Challenge of World
Poverty is today one of the least cited. Even at the time of its publication it was
predominantly (if respectfully) overlooked: “Myrdal’s diagnoses are sound, but some
of his prescriptions seem far out of reach,” as the Kirkus Reviews had it.8 And yet,
ignored as it was during his lifetime, it remains of paramount interest today both for
its reading of the history of international development as a function of domestic
inequality (and the remedies of welfare and planning Myrdal proposes for this) and
because of what it tells us about the changing status of the idea of equality itself, from
more or less the precise moment the book went to press.

A Changing International Context

Myrdal set to writing The Challenge of World Poverty at a critical time both in the
history of the relationship between the rich Western democracies and the poor coun-
tries and in his own life’s work. In the late 1960s, he and Alva were busy reinvesting
their intellectual energies back in Stockholm after more than a decade either in Delhi
or on the road (while Gunnar wrote Asian Drama and Alva pursued her diplomatic
career).9 But revisiting one of his longest-standing concerns—the aspiration to extend
the national welfare state internationally—with the experience of Asian Drama behind
him, with social democratic Sweden around him (from 1967 to 1973 he was the
founding chair of the governing board of the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, SIPRI), and amid the wider international climate of the Vietnam escalation
(he was active in at least two antiwar groups in Sweden), Myrdal was prompted to
reassess much of what had passed as common sense for him before.10 He seemed for
the first time to recognize that the changing nature of domestic citizenship at home

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in the rich countries was likely to be decisive in how the benefits of the welfare state
were to be extended internationally.
In the postwar era, the former “antinomy between economic internationalism and
economic nationalism was resolved decisively in favor of the latter,” Jamie Martin
rightly points out in his essay for this dossier. But on the cusp of the 1970s, as Myrdal
was at work on The Challenge of World Poverty, the advanced industrial nations were
just then coming to the conclusion that this antinomy might now be resolved in a
radically different way. For one there was the rich nations’ turn to international insti-
tutions as a specific strategy for meeting the growing welfare demands of their citizens
(one aspect of which Alan Milward would later characterize as the “European rescue
of the nation state”).11 For another, the rise of international finance meant they no
longer needed to refrain from the benefits of more fully opening up their national
economies to international currency movements (since the risks of this new liberalized
economy could be borne disproportionately by others—which meant, in practice, the
poor countries).12 In the language of the time, “interdependence” now became the key
foreign policy challenge of the age.13
In short, it was not just the relationship between the rich and the poor countries
that had changed as Myrdal was writing but the relationship between the national and
the international scale itself that was undergoing another of its periodic tectonic shifts.
Aware of the former, but hazier on the latter, Myrdal set out to fit these changes into
his understanding of the history of nationally metered global inequality: interpreting
it as he had always done as a function of “circular and cumulative causation” but
adding now one or two accommodationist shifts.14 Myrdal thus began The Challenge
of World Poverty with an analysis of the problem confronting the poor countries. He
then turned to the responsibilities of the rich countries, before offering a synthesis of
the two. This was a structure he had used many times before in analyzing the problem
of “an international economy.” He saw no reason to change it now when it came to
drawing the lessons. He did, however, see fit to draw a different moral.
Myrdal first took up the problem as it confronted the poor countries, reprising
the basic thrust of his argument in Asian Drama but also fixing it more specifically
now to the question of domestic inequality: “the equality issue is central in the devel-
opment problems of underdeveloped countries . . . [it] becomes an element, often a
main element, in all specific policy issues such as community development, agricul-
tural policy, education reform, and of course taxation” (49). These topics composed
the bulk of his empirical exegesis, and in each his intention was to demonstrate that
to the numerators of underdevelopment a, b, c, d, and e, should be added the common
denominator of inequality. But Myrdal is thinking here primarily of domestic
inequality. Aside from a few passing references to “neo-colonialism,” and even a
tongue-in-cheek segue to take in Justice William Douglas’s (already then somewhat
dated) call for America to stand with the forces of “world revolution” not “political
reaction,” he had little of substance to say about the ways in which rich country
“power geometries,” as we might call them today, transected with those in poor
countries (75).15
This somewhat contradicted his argument in part 3, where he turned to the

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 “responsibility of the developed countries” (270). As Myrdal saw it, these responsibil-
ities chiefly involved overcoming their intellectual myopia, beginning with the theory
of international trade. Here the nature of interstate relations enters the scene for the
first time. Economists had been wrong to stress a natural tendency toward the interna-
tional equalization of incomes. On the contrary, Myrdal had long pointed out, trade
and capital movements alike “will generally tend to breed inequality [between
nations], and will do so the more strongly when substantial [domestic] inequalities are
already established” (279). In short, people should feel as guilty about the trade they
happily undertook with the poor countries (given the terms of that trade) as they did
about the aid they did not give. Myrdal places much of the blame here too on the
rising burden of debt that these forms of unequal exchange were fastening on the poor
countries. Writing in the 1960s, he was not alone in this. “The machinery of economic
development could be overloaded with foreign debt until it sputtered to a halt amid
half-built projects and mountains of discarded plans,” the former president of the
World Bank, Eugene Black (1949–62), had put it. Black’s successor, George Woods
(1962–68), likewise followed up on the warnings of a “debt explosion.” But there was
little willingness to translate these concerns into more flexible public finance. Rather,
“the trend has gone in the opposite way,” Myrdal lamented.
In fact, the trend was about to worsen. Myrdal recognized what was to be one of
the key aspects of this when he concluded his critique of the rich countries with a nod
toward the emerging specter of inflation. It was common at this time for the rich
countries to raise the white flag of their own exchange balances as a reason for not
entering into fairer terms of trade with the poor world. But these “must be considered
self-inflicted” Myrdal shot back—a product, particularly in the United States, of rising
public and private consumption, along with huge expenditures on armaments for
Vietnam, “moon flights, etc,” without corresponding increases in taxation. “The result
is inflation,” Myrdal pointed out and, worst of all, when that inflation is unevenly
distributed between the rich nations it contributed also to exchange difficulties. At the
same time, the actual steps needed to even up terms of trade (more aid, lower tariffs,
less bilateral agreements) are “small aid” in comparison: by which he meant they were
eminently doable (300–301). For Myrdal the more “emphatic” and “extravagant”
declarations of the rich countries toward the poor, be it the UN’s Charter with its
“We the peoples . . . ,” Kennedy’s “Development Decade,” or Johnson’s “War on
Poverty” were not only superfluous to requirements. They had, if anything, actually
worked to obscure what was really at play: the calculating pursuit by the wealthier
countries of geostrategic advantage in the Cold War and the displacement abroad of
the true costs of the prosperity they enjoyed at home.
When pieced together this was about as radical an analysis it was possible to put
forward at the start of the 1970s and still hope to find a sympathetic hearing among
the liberal policy elite in America that Myrdal most wished to influence. A diplomat
when he wanted to be, Myrdal therefore softened the blow by flattering his targets.
“International leadership” was needed more than ever from the United States, he said,
but it “must be in the form of vigorous attempts to strengthen international
compassion and solidarity, necessary to build up intergovernmental cooperation

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within the United Nations for disarmament, global peace-keeping, and joint responsi-
bility for the development and welfare of the poor countries” (PAGE). Myrdal needn’t
have bothered. No amount of sweetening the pill could disguise the fact that 1970 was
a terrible year in which to be publishing a book on the nature of the rich countries’
obligations to the poor world.
It was, first of all, a pivotal moment for the West. Within a year the Bretton
Woods system had begun its rapid decline, with Nixon’s suspension of the dollar’s
convertibility into gold as part of his New Economic Policy of June 1971. In 1973 the
first OPEC oil shock exacerbated the resulting international monetary instability and
added to mounting fears of resource scarcity. Further adding to this “complex of
problems” were the more secular changes underway in the European and American
domestic economies, as they now variously began their transition from a Fordist to
post-Fordist regime of accumulation (xii). This would profoundly transform not only
their domestic welfare states but also the underlying terms of their economic relations
with the poor countries. In short, the very ground on which Myrdal believed he stood
while writing this book was falling out from under him. Not least, from out of the
inflationary crises of the 1970s, a new anti-inflationary, distinctly conservative fiscal
consensus—the birthing water of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—was soon
being generated.16 And as Western nations looked for new, non-Keynesian ways to
deal with the problem of stagflation, the gun was also being loaded for the Volcker
interest rate hike of 1981 and the subsequent “lost decade” across much of the devel-
oping world (as interest rate rises in America led first to higher international loan
repayments and in due course to defaults and unsustainable debt burdens: first in
Mexico, then Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador).
The year 1970 was thus also poignantly located within the history of the devel-
oping nations. Perhaps most significantly, The Challenge of World Poverty was situated
midway on the arc of a rising tide of anger that linked the frustrations of the first
UNCTAD conference of 1964 in Geneva with the declaration of the NIEO in 1974.
As Myrdal was writing, the Latin American “powder keg,” as he described it, had been
lighting up for some time. The fiasco of Guevara’s last stand in Bolivia had ended in
1967, but not before his public message to the first tricontinental meeting in Havana
of Asian, African, and Latin American radicals to “create two, three, many Vietnams.”
UNCTAD and the NIEO were in certain respects the diplomatic face of this same
wave of anticolonial nationalism. Headed by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch,
UNCTAD attempted to forge a more effective north-south dialogue and to achieve a
fairer climate for international trade. Conceived as a permanent negotiating
instrument, one around which the G-77 nations would for the first time coalesce as a
distinctive (if not always unified) voice, it was one of the most important events in
the United Nations’ history, according to Secretary General U. Thant.17 UNCTAD
was also intended from the start to put the specific problems of developing countries
firmly on the rich world’s agenda.
Encouraged by Kennedy’s announcement of a Decade of Development in 1961,
the developing nations put enormous faith in UNCTAD. Yet already by the time of
its second round, held in Delhi in 1968, those hopes had been dashed. Myrdal himself
described the Delhi round as “almost a complete failure” and he shared Prebisch’s

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 verdict on the reasons: “It seems that prosperity, in people as well as in nations, tends
to form an attitude of detachment if not indifference to the well-being of others,” as
Prebisch put it (301). But it was always much more than that, of course. As U.S.
representative George Ball wrote back to the State Department during the first round
in 1964, the rich countries may have been playing along but they had no real intention
of giving what the poor countries were asking for.18
The failure of the NIEO and the establishment of what Mark Mazower has termed
the “real new international economic order” was to reveal something else about the
relationship between rich countries and poor.19 Namely, for all that Third Worldist
scholars like Andre Gunder Frank, Keith Griffin, and Samir Amin were at this point
making waves with their theories of the capitalist “development of underdevel-
opment,” the rich countries too, and the United States in particular, were coming to
a sharp realization as to the nature of their own “dependencies” in an age of growing
“raw material sovereignty.”20 In an important sense, then, the “age of fracture” as
Daniel Rodgers has so vividly characterized it for the rich democracies, was breaking
at this moment on the international realm as well.21
The years after the publication of The Challenge of World Poverty were also when
a new age of humanitarianism and human rights came to dominate the international
agenda. This too was to profoundly change the very backdrop against which Myrdal
was speaking. For just as the Western left was discovering at this moment that,
whatever it did or said, its once core constituency of a convenable working class was
dissipating before its eyes—at least partly because of the achievements of the welfare
state—and a moment of national political possibility was closing down, so too was
Myrdal speaking to a moment of international possibility that was on the way out.22
“Optimism . . . about the third world gave way to dark pessimism.”23 Daniel Patrick
Moynihan’s response to the NIEO—it was nothing less than a case of “third world
extremism,” he said, as if geography itself were a new form of terror—stands in
somewhat for the general decline in Western willingness to jaw-jaw thereafter.24
Henceforth talk of interstate transfers, of transnational organizations and
“enlightened” national governments as seedbeds of an elective global public fell away,
as indeed did the popularity of structural analyses of the condition of world poverty.
Instead it was the dilemmas of “global hunger” and the challenge of “lifeboat earth”
that would illuminate the remaining available paths toward the contemporary era of
global “governance.” Henceforth, poverty came increasingly to be seen, though not
for the first time of course, as a property of the poor themselves. International bodies
like the World Bank that had been established to channel the surplus capital and
resources of the rich world toward the “take off,” “integration,” and “catching-up” of
the poor countries were assigned new roles as the surveillant and disciplinary organs
of a Western-oriented global market economy. It was thus not just the values and the
objectives that were receding from Myrdal’s grasp as The Challenge of World Poverty
hit the printing press. It was the very tools with which Myrdal would have his policy
prescriptions carried out. Not unaware, this seems to have set Myrdal to rethinking—a
rethinking that goes at least some of the way toward explaining the central conundrum
of the book: namely, why a book that is fundamentally concerned with inequality
should be subtitled (and rhetorically framed as) an “anti-poverty manifesto.”

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The Equality Issue in World Development
To resolve this conundrum we need to delve a little deeper into the role of equality in
Myrdal’s thinking. Equality had long been one of Myrdal’s central preoccupations.
“We deceive ourselves,” he wrote in 1960, “if we believe that we can create a vision
that can successfully compete with political communism merely by offering liberty in
some form, while shying away from the other main component ideal in the Western
heritage—equality.”25 Moreover, he consistently argued, for much of the time against
the mainstream of his profession, that equality was no externality of benign economic
growth. Nor was inequality somehow necessary for economic growth—a view that
had become standard since Simon Kuznets’s Economic Growth and Income Inequality
(1955).26 Rather, equality was the necessary condition for economic growth because, to
compress the argument rather brutally, it nourished the quality of the social institu-
tions that growth relied on.
Unusually for a First World economist, Myrdal further carried this institutional
(and distinctly social democratic) understanding of equality with him over to his first
serious engagements with the question of economic development and underdevel-
opment in the mid-1950s. And in making this case Myrdal thus placed himself at the
very cusp of a generation of thought about the international politics of social duties:
for what he was raising, in effect, was a global social question along the lines that the
national social question—la question sociale, die soziale frage—had begun to be asked
within the rich countries a century before.27 The 1956 lectures he gave in Egypt at the
invitation of the National Bank of Cairo, for example, were primarily concerned with
the inadequacy of existing economic theory to explain the ongoing underdevelopment
of the poor world.28 As Myrdal argued, there was no stable economic equilibrium
within and between nations, as classical economics assumed, and so the only solution
to the “circular and cumulative” nature of economic development in some parts of
the world and economic underdevelopment in others was coordinated planning.
Planning was necessary to even out the “backwash” effects of international trade and
to counter for political inequalities in access to capital and resource within nations. In
short, the “trail he blazed,” as Samuel Moyn puts it elsewhere in this collection of
essays, was to show that inequality was the primary problem that needed solving:
economic (and indeed social) development would follow.29
It was this understanding of the problem of underdevelopment as being funda-
mentally a problem of insufficient equality that placed the idea of a “welfare world”
at the very heart of Myrdal’s analysis of economic underdevelopment, a point he
would go on to elaborate in Beyond the Welfare State. By this he did not mean, as has
often been assumed, a form of “global” welfare: “to realize in the wider world
community the goals of the national Welfare State,” as one write-up of this argument
had it after a lecture Myrdal gave at Columbia in 1960.30 Myrdal was all too aware
that the bonds of international solidarity required to constitute a “global community”
were simply too weak. What he envisaged, rather, was the establishment of the interna-
tional conditions for the global spread of the national welfare state. And by this he
meant “the internationalization of national policy structures” as part of a wider and
necessarily gradualist process of “transforming . . . national integration into a more

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 inclusive international solidarity.”31 In Myrdal’s imagining, welfare world would thus
be a state of “created harmony” (my emphasis) in which “people in the developed
countries must be made to feel something of the rational generosity in their relations
with underdeveloped countries that has gradually developed in the internal relations”
(298–99, emphasis in original).32
If this was a more modest proposal, it was still a radical departure from the actually
existing “international economy” and the direction in which many of his colleagues
were traveling. It was also one that he elaborated in close dialogue—as ever—with
Alva Myrdal, who spoke to the theme of a “scientific approach to international
welfare” in her own capacity as the then director of the Department of Social Science
at UNESCO, in a lecture of at Columbia University in 1953.33 Promoting welfare was
a “generational challenge,” and Alva drew attention to the temptation of directing aid
to economic growth in place of social welfare to underscore why the challenge would
only become more pressing over time.34 Like Gunnar she too raised the question of
scale clearly, insofar as this was an obstacle to welfare reform in the poor countries,
yet she too failed to see the international domain as any more than a constellation of
tessellating nationalisms: not as the global sphere of combined and uneven develop-
ments it surely was, and thereby itself also a necessary locus of political activity in any
aspirant welfare world. “Unbalanced development” was thus a resolutely national
concern and the remedy lay in the possible multiplier effects of externally energized
“community development.”35 This at any rate would stand in, duly shepherded by the
midwifery of social welfare workers, until indigenous communities became sufficiently
“individualized in their own psychology.”
No less than Alva, who decried the lack of an appropriate “theory of social
change,” Gunnar was not fooled either as to the difficulties of realizing any of this.36
Above all, as he was quick to underscore, the achievement of the welfare state at home
was itself one of the primary impediments to achieving it abroad.37 This was a theme
outlined in Cairo and repeated in both the Dyason Lectures he gave in Melbourne
(in 1957) and the Storr Lectures he gave at Yale (in 1958). The welfare state built up
social solidarity and security and its continuation in democratic states was guaranteed,
he believed. But the national welfare state itself contributed to a form of human
solidarity that “stopped clear at the national boundary.”38 Despite this scalar paradox,
Myrdal believed in his earliest forays into development economics that this was a
surmountable challenge. So much so, in fact, that in his earlier writing he was not
even convinced of the need for any separate or additional redistribution of wealth
between nations: “A wholescale income equalization by redistribution between nations
is both impossible and, I am inclined to believe, an unimportant objective.”39 The
point, rather, was to address the structural impediments to greater equality by
fostering both greater international cooperation and the cosmopolitan solidarity this
relied on.
To the extent that something like aid (qua economic redistribution) was less
important in Myrdal’s earlier thinking, then, this was because it represented for him
merely a poor substitute for “a wider rational equalization program”—one that
included political and institutional reforms as well. Perhaps inflected by having arrived
in Cairo “at the height of Egyptian nationalism,” itself a focal point in the rising tide

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Figure 1. Google Ngram charting salience of “welfare world” and “global poverty” in
English-language books.

of the non-aligned movement, Myrdal also initially put great faith in “the appearance
on the stage of the learned discourse of a host of new participants from nations which
have until recently been kept passively submissive and mute.”40 He was thinking here
not just of the non-aligned movement as a political force but of the intellectual waters
flowing into public debate from the new regional commissions such as the Economic
Commission for Latin American (better known by its Spanish acronym of CEPAL)
formerly headed by Prébisch, and from the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE)
that Myrdal himself had overseen during its formative years. Indeed, at this stage he
seems to have thought that the challenge of overcoming the nationalistic tendencies
of the Western welfare state would, under pressure from these global institutional
bully pulpits, not only prove a surmountable challenge; it was practically inevitable.
That was before, however. The “challenge of world poverty” as Myrdal came to
see it by the end of the 1960s was a different one. By then it had become clear, even
to he who counted himself among the “dreamers” of the new day, that Western coun-
tries in fact had found every reason to avoid surmounting the problems created by the
inherent nationalism of their own welfare states. And rather than get drawn into
making a more radical counterargument, it seems Myrdal instead now modulated his
earlier arguments for welfare world to fit the new contingencies. The failure of
UNCTAD provides clues, and some justification, as to why he took this path. Myrdal
did not disagree with the call for more structural reforms put forward by UNCTAD
and the NIEO, but he clearly did not hold out much hope for them actually being
put into place either. He thus now switched tack and laid greater weight on aid as the
most important thing the rich countries needed to do: in part because he felt that
anything else would be politically toxic and because the prospects for a wider
“managed consensus” on the international economy—prospects which had once
seemed so bright—had by now receded almost entirely from view. And on this, of
course, he was absolutely right.
The Challenge of World Poverty’s revisitation of welfare world needs approaching
in light of this. Myrdal had not, by 1970, given up on the desirability of a welfare
world. But he did seem to have realized, given the current international climate, that
aid was the most he could ask for (for all that he still recognized that the mere transfer
of wealth from rich to poor on its own was insufficient). And aid being the chosen

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 tool, the question Myrdal seems to have ultimately come round to asking himself in
this book was what was the most that could possibly be done with it? The book that
The Challenge of World Poverty ultimately became (rather than the one Myrdal initially
set out to write) thus concerned itself with two interrelated questions: first, how to
create a realistic pathway toward international redistribution using aid as the primary
tool; and second, how to convince the public and their politicians that this was both
necessary and affordable. Myrdal again made the welfare state central to both his
answers, but not—and this is crucial—in the way he had earlier suggested. Before, the
Western welfare state had been the model for, and yet also the barrier to, welfare
world on account of its intrinsic nationalism; now Myrdal sought to demonstrate it
could be the bridge. If the Western welfare state could not be spread or institution-
alized internationally, if it could not be scaled up in the current climate, perhaps it
could at least be deployed at home to enable a relatively greater degree of “rational
equalization”—via aid—globally.
Here was the classic Myrdalian move. In place of an (American) “dilemma” or
(Asian) “drama” we now have a (global) “challenge”: this time, the challenge of
turning the Western welfare state from a problem to a solution (a reframing of the
problem, we might note, that worked to hide a more personal dilemma for Myrdal:
his refusal to relinquish either welfare world or the American creed). As Myrdal now
presented it, only through the institutional organs of the welfare state could the kind
of sacrifices necessary to enable a greater flow of aid to the poor world be rendered
both manageable and fair in the rich world. One needed the institutions of the welfare
state—strong unions with high membership rates, effective systems of social
bargaining, a state committed to “rational planning,” and so on—in order both to
inculcate the need for, and above all to spread the costs of, helping distant strangers.
Myrdal pitched this as about finding the means within a democracy to generate
consensus for policies with long-term benefits but most likely also short-term costs
(299). But this last throw of the global welfare die was also ultimately, in effect, to
make this less geopoliticized version of welfare world now entirely reliant on the
(presumed fixed) capacity of the Western welfare state to deliver it.
Underpinning this move intellectually was Myrdal’s reframing of the question of
distribution. Where previously Myrdal had sought to show that the welfare state
enabled development (through the socioeconomic benefits it conveyed), he now put
greater emphasis on the fact that the welfare state also enabled distribution (of socio-
economic costs). Such a view developed out of not only his reading of the
contemporary welfare state in Sweden but also his largely unhappy experiences of
trying to actually “plan” for social reforms in the Indian subcontinent. What was now
required, simply put, was national distribution of the costs of international inte-
gration. In this light, aid could be seen as a natural extension of the Western welfare
state, and maximizing this (rather than advocating for new institutions of global
welfare per se) was to be the principal objective.
With this argument in place, Myrdal then proceeded to outline a proposal for a
form of global tax and spend. As he put it: “In the future we should try to move
toward a common recognition of aid to underdeveloped countries as a collective
responsibility for the developed countries, the burden of which should be shared in

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an agreed fair way amounting to an approach to a system of international taxation”
(365). Myrdal saw that countries like Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands were
already well on the way toward this. In the United States, he expected that aid appro-
priations would initially “continue plunging downward for a time.” Yet Myrdal
remained optimistic that common recognition of the burden of responsibility would
win out even in the United States too. The alternative—a system of “tied aid” which
“work[s] toward a segregative economic system,” private capital inflow statistically
gerrymandered into aid contributions, and punitive loan arrangements—was simply
too “irrational” for Myrdal to imagine that it could continue for very long (366–67).
“An international agreement, binding all developed countries,” was what was needed
(367). This, then, was how Myrdal sought to square the circle of working toward a
more progressive international economy at a time of resurgent national autarky: a
reform that was, as he insisted all reforms should be, “radically directed but conserva-
tively managed.”41
If this was now something less than a nation-state–based utopia for the world (it
was closer to a nation-state based–response to global dystopia) it was also, it seems, a
strategic choice. Myrdal had been against aid before and he would be skeptical of it
(for different reasons) again.42 Turning to the Western welfare state now not as a
scalable model for international redistribution but as the means of absorbing the costs
(to the rich world) of a greater measure of international economic solidarity probably
looked like a good strategic choice at the time. It enabled Myrdal to square against an
international climate of growing distrust and anxiety over “inter-dependence” and
even allowed him to reframe tax and spend as a cost-effective extension of aid.
And yet, in a further twist, it would turn out to be a highly unfortunate choice as
well, albeit for a reason Myrdal can hardly have foreseen. For Myrdal was suddenly
now confronted by the fact that, from the early 1970s onward, the gap between the
rich and poor within America and other rich Western nations would begin to widen
dramatically, after a long period of declining inequality domestically. And this would
soon put historic pressure on the rich nations’ own domestic welfare states. The tragic
irony of The Challenge of World Poverty, then, was that in calling up the Western
welfare state to duty as the solution to the problem of generating “take off” in the
direction of greater international inequality, Myrdal’s book was fated to have been
written at the cusp of the historic upswing of Western inequality in the mid-late twen-
tieth century.

Global Welfare in an Age of Inequality

Myrdal’s strategic turn to the Western welfare state thus solved one problem but at
the cost of creating a new one, and in so doing it opened up a further paradox at the
heart of The Challenge of World Poverty. For despite its originally stated intentions, it
is neither Africa nor Latin America that ultimately provided the book’s new
geographical references (Africa gets barely a look in; Latin America is confined to an
appendix).43 Rather the “second case country,” as Myrdal announces midway through
the book, turned out to be Sweden. Looking to Sweden allowed Myrdal well to show
how the Western welfare state might be put to work internationally. But the manner
in which he drew the comparison—essentially denuding Sweden of the political

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 Figure 2. Income inequality in Western countries, 1900–2010.

dynamics that explained and made possible its greater commitment to foreign
aid—was to cause him more problems than it solved. It also suggests that while
Myrdal’s commitment to the value of equality had not deserted him, even at the end
of his long career, his willingness to turn to social democracy as a political paradigm
for realizing equality internationally had become increasingly mute, if it had not
deserted him outright.
This can itself, I think, be seen as a consequence of the very forces Myrdal was
trying to square off against, and it becomes apparent not because Myrdal in any way
tries to reject social democracy but in the rather curious way he tries to advocate it.
Contra the Americans, Myrdal wrote, in setting out the lesson that Sweden presented
for international development, the Swedes “are not inclined to find an excuse for aid
in the opportunity to use it for spreading haphazardly a subsidy to private individuals
and business firms at home” (360). They were not, in other words, interested in “tied
aid,” or aid in the service of foreign policy and big business. But this was not because
they were social democratic per se, Myrdal asserts. It was a function of historical luck:
they had never had colonies or overseas interests to tempt them in this regard. What
social democracy contributed, rather, was simply the fact of an extensive welfare state
that in turn allowed the “conquering strength” of what Myrdal frames as the “moral”
imperative to help distant strangers to rise up and look beyond its own shores (362).
As Myrdal said:

I have hesitated to tell this story, feeling that it would sound nationalistic. But I
have overcome that hesitation, as I want to be scrupulously honest and I need to
cite this actual experience in a laboratory case for the policy conclusions I want to
draw . . . There is nothing unusual about the Swedes except that they are placed
in a situation where the only reason they could have for aid to underdeveloped

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 countries is the moral one of solidarity with people in distress—the same principle
upon which they have built their welfare state at home. (363)

Nothing unusual, perhaps, except in comparison to the United States. Myrdal here
seems to assume that the difference between a liberal and a social-democratic society
is one of moral pedagogy: the Swedes had undertaken such learning and assented to
their social duties accordingly; Americans had yet to experience the epiphany. But
selling welfarism to his American audience in this way (as a moral rather than political
construct) not only required Myrdal to gloss over the history of political struggle that
enabled the Swedish welfare state in the first place. He was also forced to downplay
the important element of self-interest (not humanitarianism) within that. Moreover,
the welfare state—as one of its key critics famously put it—is above all else a power
mobilization strategy: a fact that raises the question not just of welfare and devel-
opment but also of how the social democratic project has brought them together
precisely by empowering the weak against the strong.44
By sidestepping this political history, Myrdal was obliged to relocate the core
challenge to welfare world in the present. Myrdal had successfully removed the
Western welfare state from its role as the primary barrier to welfare world, but in
accordance with this more liberal political philosophy he now put the domestic poor
of the rich world, and above all of the American poor, in its place. What would stop
the Western welfare state from being used to sustain a more generous form of interna-
tional redistribution? As Myrdal now wrote: “It is wrong to put the blame on the
‘capitalists,’ as is often done by some ignorant radicals. On this point, the people are the
reactionaries” (297, emphasis in original). Moreover, he added, “It is often the poor
who are reactionary.”
This remarkable passage, which finds its roots in the contemporaneous rise of
“community development” and the War on Poverty within the U.S. domestic scene
(and which was itself a part of the wider backwash of international development to
the national scale), is what pivots Myrdal’s earlier calls for welfare world into the new
call for an “anti-poverty programme.” The solution to international inequality indeed
now simply became the education of these vested interests at home (rather than
addressing the structural bases of unearned privilege).45 By glossing the politics of
social democracy in such a way that it might sound plausible to expect the same results
from a more “enlightened” liberal domestic context like that of the United States, and
by founding this in turn on the moral imperative of helping others, the structural
inequalities Myrdal initially set out to diagnose now became the walls that defined the
limits of his analytical reach, rather than the subject of analysis itself.46 The way was
open, and from the welfarist side no less, for global poverty to replace international
inequality as the primary referent of “development.” The argument had indeed been
staged (and lost) at home.
If Myrdal appeared to have painted himself into a corner here it ought nonetheless
to be stressed that he was groping for solutions somewhat in the intellectual dark. The
Challenge of World Poverty was written at a moment when the two dominant theo-
retical preoccupations of the book—domestic redistribution (what Myrdal described
in terms the formation of a “hard” state) and the international political system (what

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 he referred to as international “integration”)—had yet to be given their classic state-
ments. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which circled the wagons around the national
welfare state by providing a “complex egalitarian” account of “democratic equality,”
was not published until 1971. Wallerstein’s The Modern World System, which nudged
theories of world regions toward the notion of a singular (albeit differentiated) space
of flows, was not published until 1974. Let alone had the question of how these two
lines of inquiry might be addressed simultaneously been raised as directly as Myrdal
was raising it here: indeed this was a question that would keep Rawls’s interlocutors
occupied for several decades.47
It is hardly surprising that Myrdal therefore lacked the necessary analytical vocab-
ulary with which to fuse national and international ethics together within the liberal
tradition he was seeking to reach out to and to influence. And this goes some of the
way to explaining why he ended up talking at cross-purposes to himself: falling back
on the tautological idea of majoritarian morality, or “right thinking,” as the normative
bedrock justifying the political claims of a good society. One is left merely to surmise,
therefore, that if Perry Anderson could fairly write of Rawl’s Theory of Justice—the
defining statement on liberal equality—that what it should have been called, or what
was at least needed at the time, was a theory of injustice, the same criticism applied
only that much more so when it came to Myrdal.48 For in seeking to give equality
faster passage out of troubled waters, Myrdal had been forced to give his original
analysis of inequality a second-class ticket. He had become a more liberal egalitarian.
The consequence of this was fateful, for Myrdal was, in effect, taking up position
on the same intellectual ground that advocates of global poverty amelioration still
occupy today. The dramatic changes in U.S. domestic politics during the age of civil
rights and Vietnam had given Americans cause to reevaluate their assumptions about
citizenship, morality, religion, and human-nature relationships domestically, and they
were forging those into a platform for a new internationalism: one that reached out
to help others, rather than seeking to extend its own benefits to them. Myrdal had
hitched his continued desire for a welfare world to a political movement he saw
correctly had powerful momentum, but whose ultimate direction he miscalculated.
Shortly after Robert McNamara took up office at the World Bank in 1968, for
example, the bank shifted emphasis first toward dealing with domestic inequality in
the poor countries (not international inequality), then soon after to “absolute poverty”
(again at the domestic level of the poor countries), until finally, by the mid-1970s, it
was almost purely concerned with “basic needs” within those countries.49 Distribution
became a superfluous metric; politics dropped off the agenda.50 Henceforth, and for
at least the next few decades, the dominant trend in economic development would be
for poverty reduction rather than redistribution, and the problems would be almost
entirely located in the poor countries alone. The same trend was apparent within the
rich countries too; indeed, programs like the deployment of Peace Corps volunteers
in the War on Poverty at home had helped consolidate ideas of a singular, organic
world poverty. Poverty now resided in the bodies (and choices) of the poor themselves.
Charity and philanthropy replaced welfare.
These practical adjustments further intersected with a series of scalar realignments
in economic theory that also now pulled Myrdal’s earlier arguments out of play. First,

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“economic growth” was brought back in as a desiderata of development, only this
time it was understood as aggregate growth driven by the rich. The poor of the world
were simply invited by the rich countries to come and “share” in this new model of
prosperity through offers of assistance to help make them more “productive” (in ways
that served the needs of the rich countries’ economies as well). The rich countries’
own domestic poor, meanwhile, would themselves in due course be lifted out of
welfare, placed in workfare, and pressed into taking up whatever employment was
available to them (usually such rump employment as could not be outsourced to the
poor countries).51 These reconfigured institutional responses were partly, but only
partly, about the new “economic ethics” that now preferred a more anodyne measure
of poverty alleviation to the politically charged one of inequality. They were equally
seized on, in the early 1970s, as political strategies: and specifically as ways to outflank
both the NIEO (and the rest of the Third World rising) and domestic “social
problems” at home.
The NIEO, for example, was about national scale redistribution: a better deal for
poor countries. Basic needs circumvented its calls by going directly to the people (a fact
which no doubt explains the lukewarm response to it by poor country governments).52
Social problems at home, meanwhile, were individualized the better to avoid federal
culpability.53 They were also projected onto particular “communities,” which were
themselves further located in the city and thereby further written out of “society.”54
In the process the links between the creation of rich world wealth and poor country
poverty were analytically severed for a generation (even as solutions for their
management and control were increasingly transferred between them). This came at
the very moment, moreover, that domestically empowered corporations, global
finance, and the vast reshaping of class relations internationally under an emergent
New International Division of Labor were about to ensure that the wealth of the rich
and the poverty of the poor everywhere, at home and abroad, were more intimately
linked than ever before.
Myrdal was right, therefore, that the battleground had shifted to within the rich
countries. This was to prove a generational shift, and his genius in this book was to
recognize this and to seek to find a way to respond to it. But his effort to shore up
the prospects for welfare world by reframing the function of the Western welfare state
within that also required Myrdal to reframe his earlier social democratic internation-
alism as a form of national humanitarianism that he believed made a stronger case, in
a hostile international climate, for the transnational solidarity he wished to see. This
ultimately provided the tools for others to reimagine and reconstruct that transna-
tional solidarity as a form of individualist (and rights-based) humanitarianism. In so
doing it also directly mirrored the process then underway within American liberalism
more specifically: wherein the arguments deployed to defend the national welfare state
by thinkers such as Rawls ended up, inadvertently, providing the foundation for a
cosmopolitan individualism they did not necessarily approve of.55

Conclusion
Ultimately Myrdal’s The Challenge of World Poverty was proven right in the manner it
was declared at the time to be wrong: the deafening silence with which his policy

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 advice was greeted. What the world got after 1970 was global triage, not global
welfare.56 Both futures were imaginable within Myrdal’s still viable analytical model
of circular and cumulative causation. They fairly represented the two “developmental”
choices as were presented to the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And it was
Myrdal’s great achievement to have been able to specify quite accurately the nature of
this fork in the road.
Nonetheless, it was also Myrdal’s great failure, and to some extent poor luck, that
the choices that fork imposed (between freedom and equality, rights and responsibil-
ities, and the relative costs and benefits of retrenching the welfare state vs. expanding
it) were already being made in favor of liberty, human rights, and “divestiture” of the
welfare state—for together they defined a very different future for international devel-
opment.57 Having reframed his earlier arguments within the liberal paradigm, Myrdal
now lacked the structural bite needed to explain why these choices might also turn
out to be compromises: that the promotion of human freedom was not a sufficient
substitute for the parallel search for equality, for example. He was also forced to
downplay the fact that the Western welfare state might be a solution to “world
poverty” only under very specific political conditions. For this reason alone his work
provided insufficient means to foster the greater empathy that he himself called for.
Myrdal failed in this not on account of his technical analyses but on account of
his interpretation of the wider problem of global inequality as one of insufficient
morality and his coming to hold the Western world’s poor (the “basket of deplorables”
as they might be referred to today) chiefly responsible for this, rather than the struc-
tural inequalities on which he had earlier placed greater emphasis.58 This short-
circuited his own analytical framework and seems to have prevented him from seeing
that inequality was not merely an indicator of failed politics: it could itself be the basis
for a highly successful political project, such as neoliberalism in particular now became.
To say all of this is in part, of course, to accuse Myrdal unfairly of not preventing the
future from arriving. But it is also to recognize that the future he failed to prevent was
one built on a series of arguments that he (and many others) failed to win in his
lifetime.

NOTES

1. Myrdal would immediately go on to try to write a follow up to American Dilemma, with

the planned title An American Dilemma Revisited. Plans were discussed, preliminary research
carried out over the years, and a rough draft completed, but Myrdal was waning. In a final effort
to revive the project in the mid-1980s the Carnegie Corporation dispatched the political scientist
and civil rights activist Leslie Dunbar to Sweden to work with a then frail Myrdal on the project.
By then it was too late. See Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social
Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1990), 366. The manuscript, as Myrdal left it unedited in 1985, was published in Swedish in 1987
by SNS Forlag under the title Historien om An American Dilemma. My thanks to Maribel Morey
for helping to track this down.
2. John Gerrard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liber-
alism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (Spring 1982):
379–415.

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 3. Cited in William Barber, Gunnar Myrdal: An Intellectual Biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 155.
4. The phrase, with its own literary riff of course, is from Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Story of a
Death Foretold: The Coup against Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Guardiola-Rivera’s dissection of the fall of Allende fills in some of the wider geopolitical context
to these few years of intense change.
5. Cited in Jeanne Marie O’Toole, “An Analysis of Gunnar Myrdal’s Social and Educational
Theory” (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University Chicago, 1972), 40, accessed October 20, 2016, http://
ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1216.
6. Myrdal was elsewhere described as a “privileged critic” and “devoted friend” of America.
See Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 347; on Raymond Aron, see Örjan Appel-
qvist and Stellan Andersson, eds., The Essential Gunnar Myrdal (New York: New Press, 2005), 245;
on “spiritual fatherland,” see Appelqvist and Andersson, The Essential Gunnar Myrdal, 247.
7. This tension was also shaped by the fact that Myrdal was, in his own way, an
“outsider”—both to the former colonial heartland of old Europe and the new hegemonic core of
the United States. Compared to a “southern” intellectual like Raúl Prebisch he may have enjoyed
a metropolitan bias in the reception of his ideas, but there was a reason American officials looked
dimly upon his becoming UN Secretary General in 1953, as his stint as the head of the ECE drew
to a close, and the position went instead to his friend Dag Hammarskjöld. Myrdal, in short,
showed altogether too much independence of mind.
8. “Kirkus review of Gunnar Myrdal, The Challenge of World Affluence,” Kirkus Reviews, June
23, 1970, accessed October 20, 2016, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gunnar-myrdal
-7/the-challenge-of-world-poverty-a-world-anti-pov/.
9. Where Alva was the Swedish ambassador to India (1955–61) and Gunnar worked on Asian
Drama.
10. It is interesting to note that United States liberals, also under impress of the Vietnam War
and its associated ethical dilemmas of the draft, of civil disobedience and the justice of war, were
undertaking a parallel reassessment at this time. See, for example, Katrina Forrester, “Citizenship,
War, and the Origins of International Ethics in American Political Philosophy, 1960–1975,”
Historical Journal, 57, no. 3 (September 2014): 773–801. Indeed, the story of The Challenge of World
Poverty is in many ways the story of the convergence of these two trajectories: of how Myrdal’s
call-up of the welfare state to international duty (and the inadvertent support he gave to advocates
of a more individualizing notion of “global poverty”) was mirrored by these liberals’ laying the
ground for the subsequent departure from the solidarity of the national welfare state toward a
more “global” (read cosmopolitan, individualist) ethical sensibility.
11. Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: Routledge, 2000
[1992]).
12. Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
13. For one of the classic statements on this, see Richard N. Cooper, “Economic Interdepen-
dence and Foreign Policy in the Seventies,” World Politics 24, no. 2 (January 1972): 159–81.
14. Myrdal derived the idea from Knut Wicksell but first fully developed it in An American
Dilemma. See also Phillip Anthony O’Hara, “Principle of Circular and Cumulative Causation:
Fusing Myrdalian and Kaldorian Growth and Development Dynamics,” Journal of Economic Issues,

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 42, No. 2 (June 2008): 375–87; and Lloyd G. Reynolds, “Myrdal’s Contribution to Economics,
1940–1970,” Swedish Journal of Economics 76, no. 4 (December 1974): 479–97.
15. In fact, he postpones further comments until part 4. By then, as we will see, he has
relocated the problem elsewhere. On power geometries, see Doreen Massey, “Power Geometries
and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon
Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), 59–69.
16. See Stefan Eich and Adam Tooze, “The Great Inflation,” in Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart:
Dimensionen des Strukturbruchs nach dem Boom, ed. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel et al. (Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).
17. United Nations, The History of UNCTAD, 1964–1984 (New York: United Nations,
1985), 10.
18. Reads Ball’s cable: “Dr. Prebisch, who has been working on this Conference for over a
year, has managed to whip up a high degree of enthusiasm among his clients. The less sophisticated
of the less-developed countries have been led to regard the Conference as the dawn of a golden
age. These expectations have been encouraged by the fact that some of the Western industrialized
countries—particularly France—have given the appearance of sympathy to Dr. Prebisch’s ideas-
although with no intention of adopting them.” Foreign Relations, 1964–1968, Volume XXXIII,
Organization and Management of Foreign Policy; “Memorandum From the Under Secretary of
State (Ball) to President Johnson,” Washington, March 30, 1964, Johnson Library, National
Security File, Agency File, United Nations, UNCTAD. Confidential.
19. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Allen Lane,
2012), 343.
20. For “raw material sovereignty,” see Christopher R.W. Dietrich, “More a Gun at Our
Heads Than Theirs: The 1967 Arab Oil Embargo, Third World Raw Material Sovereignty, and
American Diplomacy,” in Beyond the Cold War: Lyndon Johnson and the New Global Challenges of
the 1960s, ed. Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014), 225. “Dependency” is Kissinger’s term (after the 1973 embargo). Cited in ibid.
21. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
22. On the Western travails, see Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West
European Left in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (1996; London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). See also C.
Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, September-October 1960.
23. Tom Robertson, “Thinking Globally: American Foreign Aid, Paul Ehrlich, and the Emer-
gence of Environmentalism in the 1960s,” in Beyond the Cold War, ed. Gavin and Lawrence, 192.
24. Cited in Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London:
Verso, 2006), 45.
25. Gunnar Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning in the Welfare States and Its
International Implications (New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960).
26. This through its tendency to generate savings that would later “trickle down.” See Simon
Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review 45, no. 1 (March
1955): 1–28.
27. See Simon Reid-Henry, The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is
Better for Us All (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 178–82.
28. Gunnar Myrdal, Rich Lands and Poor: The Road to World Prosperity (New York: Harper
and Row, 1958). The basic argument was better captured in its original British title Economic
Theory and Under-Developed Regions (London: Duckworth, 1957).

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 29. A conference Myrdal chaired in Stockholm in 1969, shortly before CWP’s publication,
confirmed his continued commitment to the idea that successful development meant “all elements
of human life that contribute to human welfare.” ECOSOC approved the report (in which H. W.
Singer, Benjamin Higgins, and D. V. McGranahan had also participated), but for many this view
was just a little too inclusive. See H. W. Arndt, Economic Development: The History of an Idea
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 104–5.
30. “The Supplement,” Columbia Daily Spectator, December 19, 1960.
31. Gunnar Myrdal, An International Economy: Problems and Prospects (New York: Harper and
Row, 1956), 50–51.
32. See also ibid., 48–53.
33. Alva Myrdal et al., America’s Role in International Social Welfare (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1955).
34. Ibid., 3.
35. Ibid., 38–39.
36. Ibid., 47.
37. He elaborates on this in more detail in Beyond the Welfare State.
38. “Welfare State Hinders World Cooperation, Says Swedish Economist,” The Age,
September 25, 1957.
39. Gunnar Myrdal, “The Equality Issue in World Development,” Swedish Journal of
Economics 77, no. 4 (December 1975): 416.
40. See Andrés Rivarola Puntigliano and Örjan Appelqvist, “Prebisch and Myrdal: Devel-
opment Economics in the Core and on the Periphery,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 1 (March
2011): 44.
41. Örjan Appelqvist and Stellan Andersson, eds., The Essential Gunnar Myrdal (New York:
New Press, 2005), 6.
42. Compare, for example, Myrdal’s Nobel speech with his chapter “International Inequality
and Foreign Aid in Retrospect,” in Pioneers in Development, ed. Gerald M. Meier and Dudley
Seers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 151–65. See also Myrdal, “The Equality Issue in
World Development.” Myrdal had history in making strategic policy commitments against the
grain of his own reasoning (as Nils Gilman shows in his contribution to this dossier).
43. Expanding the analysis of Asian Drama out of the Indian subcontinent was intended to
be one of CWPs principal objectives.
44. “The beauty of the social democratic strategy was that social policy would also result in
power mobilization.” See Gøsta Esping Anderson, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 12.
45. On the backwash, intellectual cross-fertilization, and political agendas involved in bringing
the war on poverty home, see, among a growing literature, Gavin and Lawrence, eds., Beyond the
Cold War and Ananya Roy, et al., “ ‘The Anti-Poverty Hoax’: Development, Pacification, and the
Making of Community in the Global 1960s,” Cities 44 (April 2015): 139–45.
46. “The equality issue” thus remains, but it is no longer an issue in which the rich world is
so directly complicit: a move Myrdal first makes in this book and repeats in his Nobel lecture
(1974). Of the “profound changes that have brought about a critically new setting of the world
equality problem,” he says, “I will view these changes from the restricted viewpoint of their impact
on underdeveloped countries and of the preparedness in developed countries to come to their aid.”

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 See Myrdal, “The Equality Issue in World Development,” 421. Indeed, the word “inequality” itself
only appears three times in what is a very long lecture.
47. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971);
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). On “complex
equality,” see Norman Daniels, “Democratic Equality: Rawls’s Complex Egalitarianism,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Richard Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 241–76.
48. Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London: Verso,
2005), 112.
49. After taking office in 1968 McNamara appointed a high-level commission to report on
the problem of domestic inequality in the poor countries. The Pearson Commission announced
its findings at a conference at Columbia University in February 1970, shifting attention away from
economic growth toward a variety of “development indicators.” Though these were framed initially
as indicators of “the severe maldistribution of income and wealth,” from around 1972 what was
soon commonly referred to as “absolute poverty” itself became the single most important indicator.
See Arndt, Economic Development, 99.
50. This is not of course the same as saying that what the bank was doing was anything other
than highly political.
51. The irony of course was that economic growth now leveled off in the West as the general
rate of profit went into secular decline.
52. This move was consolidated by a further scalar realignment of Western development
policy to the rural domain (where the poorest were now seen to reside), even as urban growth
would over the decades to come see much of the most relatively intense poverty located there. On
the lukewarm response to Basic Needs, see Arndt, Economic Development, 110.
53. Doubtless this is a large part of what Myrdal would have had to address in American
Dilemma Revisited, his long promised but ultimately unfinished final work.
54. See Roy, Schrader, and Crane, “The Anti-Poverty Hoax.”
55. See the argument put forward in Forrester, “Citizenship, War, and the Origins of Interna-
tional Ethics.” For Myrdal it was not so much that the international “contaminated” (774) the
domestic as that his deliberately neutered arguments failed to provide the inoculative effect he
intended.
56. Myrdal considered this concept of triage in some detail in his Nobel lecture, “The Equality
Issue in World Development,” 426–27. He even went so far as to cite the New York Times to the
effect that this new idea of triage was “one of the most pessimistic and morally thread-bare intel-
lectual positions to be advanced since the demise of the Third Reich” (427).
57. On divestiture, see Massimo Florio, The Great Divestiture: Evaluating the Welfare Impact
of the British Privatizations, 1979–1997 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
58. This being Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate choice of words to describe Donald Trump’s
supporters during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.

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