Gunnar Myrdal is the rare figure whose work sits equally in economics, sociology and the study of public policy, and whose central ideas were all attacks on the tidiness of orthodox economics. Against the assumption that markets tend towards equilibrium and that disadvantage is self-correcting, he offered circular and cumulative causation: an initial disadvantage sets in motion changes that reinforce it, so that inequality is not a deviation from balance but a self-sustaining process. Against the claim that social science can be value-free, he argued that valuations enter research at every stage and must therefore be made explicit as stated value premises. And against the belief that legislation equals change, he coined the term for which he is best remembered in India — the soft state.
Myrdal was an institutionalist by temperament: he held that economies are embedded in attitudes, institutions, law, caste, land tenure and administration, and that models which abstract from these produce elegant conclusions about societies that do not exist. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 with Friedrich Hayek, whose intellectual opposite he was in almost every respect.
Life and intellectual formation
Born in Sweden in 1898, Myrdal trained first in law and then in economics at Stockholm, where his early technical work on monetary theory placed him among the leading figures of the Stockholm School. His partner in almost all that followed was Alva Myrdal, herself a sociologist, diplomat and later a Nobel Peace laureate; their joint work on Sweden's population and family policy in the 1930s helped shape the Swedish welfare state and set the pattern of his career — research undertaken to be acted upon.
Two commissions turned him into a comparativist. The Carnegie Corporation invited him, as an outsider without a stake in American racial politics, to direct a study of the position of black Americans, which became An American Dilemma (1944). He later spent a decade on the South Asian enquiry that became Asian Drama (1968), much of it based in India. Service in the Swedish cabinet and parliament left him sceptical of the gap between stated policy and administrative reality.
Cumulative causation and the vicious circle
An American Dilemma took its title from the contradiction Myrdal saw at the heart of American life: a national creed of liberty and equality held sincerely alongside practices of exclusion that violated it. Its lasting contribution, though, was analytical. Discrimination by whites, he argued, lowers black incomes, education, housing and health; the resulting deprivation is then read as evidence confirming the prejudice that produced it, which justifies further discrimination. Cause and effect exchange places continuously. This is the vicious circle, and its policy implication is direct: because the elements reinforce one another, a large simultaneous push across several fronts will do far more than the sum of isolated measures, and the same logic can be turned upwards into a virtuous circle.
Myrdal extended the principle to space in Economic Theory and Under-developed Regions (1957). Growth does not diffuse evenly. A region that pulls ahead attracts capital, skilled labour and enterprise from the periphery, whose resources drain towards the centre — the backwash effect — while the benefits radiating outwards from the growth pole, the spread effect, are usually weaker. Left to the market, regional inequality therefore widens, and deliberate state action is required to reverse it; in poor countries backwash tends to dominate. The argument aligned Myrdal with structuralist accounts of uneven development, and it remains a standard explanation of the persistence of backward regions.
The soft state
Asian Drama, a three-volume study of South Asian poverty, is where Myrdal's institutional method is most fully worked out and where he introduced the concept most useful to Indian sociology. A soft state, in his usage, is one characterised by deficiencies in legislation and in observance of rules, by widespread disobedience at all levels, and by a reluctance among rulers to impose obligations on the ruled. Such a state may pass ambitious laws and announce transformative plans while lacking either the capacity or the political will to enforce them; non-compliance is tolerated because those who evade the law are often those on whose support the government depends.
Several features follow. Land ceiling legislation is enacted and then defeated through benami transfers and administrative inertia; tenancy protection exists on paper while tenants remain unrecorded; taxes are legislated but not collected from the powerful. Enforcement is discretionary, and discretion becomes a resource for those who administer it — Myrdal wrote of a folklore of corruption, a widely shared public belief that officials are corrupt, which erodes compliance further even where it exaggerates the reality. He linked softness to the accommodation of vested interests in the coalitions that governed newly independent states, and to the contrast between the sweeping ambitions of planning and the modest instruments available to realise them.
The concept has proved durable in Indian debate because it names something both liberal and Marxist analyses recognise: an implementation gap between statute and outcome. It bears on land reform's failure outside a few states, on labour law that covers a small fraction of the workforce, on welfare leakage, and on the non-enforcement of environmental and minimum-wage regulation. Softness is the specific pathology of a state interventionist in ambition and weak in execution.
Value premises and the critique of objectivity
Myrdal's methodological position, argued in Value in Social Theory and Objectivity in Social Research, is that there is no view from nowhere. Valuations shape the choice of problem, the concepts used, the classification of data and the drawing of inferences; economics in particular carries buried normative assumptions inherited from natural law and utilitarianism, disguised as technical categories. Terms such as underdeveloped, backward or even development are loaded before any measurement begins.
His remedy was not relativism but discipline. Researchers should state their value premises openly at the outset, choose premises relevant to the society studied, and then reason rigorously from them, so that readers can trace where valuation ends and evidence begins. This is why he belongs in the syllabus under fact, value and objectivity, as a counterweight to Weberian value-neutrality and to positivist claims of a wholly detached social science. His own premise was egalitarian and modernising, and he never disguised it.
Criticisms
An American Dilemma was faulted by Ralph Ellison for treating black American culture as nothing but a pathological reaction to white oppression, thereby denying it independent creativity and agency; later critics added that Myrdal framed racism as a moral dilemma in white minds rather than as a structure of material interest.
Asian Drama has fared worse with time. Its pessimism about South Asian prospects was contradicted by later growth in the region and by East Asian transformation, which suggests the institutional obstacles he described were less immovable than he judged. Critics argue that his explanations drift towards attitudes and values — deemed traditional, fatalistic or undisciplined — in a way that echoes modernisation theory and risks culturalist or Eurocentric explanation of poverty. Dependency theorists made the opposite complaint: by locating the causes of poverty in domestic institutions, he underplayed colonial extraction and the structure of the world economy.
The soft state concept itself is criticised as descriptive rather than explanatory. It labels the implementation gap but does not say why particular states are soft in particular domains, and it invites the circular inference that outcomes are poor because the state is soft and the state is soft because outcomes are poor. Marxist critics reply that non-enforcement is not weakness at all but the intended result of a state whose dominant coalitions never wanted redistributive law to work — the softness is selective, hard on the poor and soft on the propertied.
Legacy
Myrdal's ideas outlived his forecasts. Cumulative causation is a standing resource in economic geography, in the study of regional disparity within India, and in explanations of the mutual reinforcement of caste disadvantage, poor schooling, poor health and low earnings — an argument that anticipates the sociology of social exclusion and connects to capability-based accounts of deprivation associated with Amartya Sen. His insistence on explicit value premises remains one of the strongest statements against the pretence of value-free social science, and the soft state has entered Indian political vocabulary so thoroughly that it is now used, and misused, well beyond its original meaning.
For the UPSC answer
Myrdal is a high-yield thinker because he supplies ready-made analytical language for three separate parts of the syllabus. Define cumulative causation as a vicious circle in which discrimination and disadvantage reinforce each other, then draw the policy inference he intended — that scattered measures fail and a coordinated push across several fronts is needed. Deploy the soft state in any question on implementation, land reform, welfare leakage or corruption, and define it precisely as a state that legislates without enforcing and tolerates non-compliance, illustrating with ceiling laws and unrecorded tenancy. In methodology questions, use his demand for explicit value premises against the ideal of value-neutrality. Always close critically: the soft state describes more than it explains, and the Marxist reply that non-enforcement is selective and deliberate rather than merely weak will lift the answer from summary to evaluation.
References & further reading
- Myrdal, Gunnar (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers.
- Myrdal, Gunnar (1957). Economic Theory and Under-developed Regions. London: Duckworth.
- Myrdal, Gunnar (1958). Value in Social Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Myrdal, Gunnar (1968). Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, 3 vols. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Myrdal, Gunnar (1970). The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Programme in Outline. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Ellison, Ralph (1964). Shadow and Act. New York: Random House.