Nobel Prize winner dies

Press, 21 May 1987, Page 32

Nobel Prize winner dies

NZPA-Reuter Stockholm Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel Prize-winning Swedish economist and sociologist who also won fame for his analysis of race relations in the United States, has died, aged 88, a hospital spokesman said. Myrdal, who had been ill for some time, died in Stockholm’s Ersta Hospital. The cause of death was not announced.

Myrdal shared the Nobel economics prize in 1974 with Friedrich von

Hayek. Three years later, he touched off controversy when he suggested the economics prize should be abolished after it was awarded to the American monetarist, Milton Friedman. The Nobel award was the high point of a career which spanned more than four decades. Myrdal’s late wife, Alva, a prominent disarmament campaigner, was . the joint winner of the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize.

Gunnar Myrdal was born in 1898. He became an economics professor in 1932 and was elected to the Swedish Parliament as a member of the Social Democratic Party in 1935. His 1944 book, “An American Dilemma,” about United States race problems, and an “Asian Drama” (1968) on the economic and social systems of South East Asia, were regarded as key works in modern economics and sociology.