How Gunnar Myrdal might approach Economics

The very question, "What is economics?" presupposes a coherence, a singular identity, that I find deeply problematic. To speak of "economics" as a distinct, objective discipline, divorced from the swirling currents of society and the bedrock of human values, is a dangerous illusion. It is a pursuit that, in its very abstraction, risks obscuring the very realities it purports to illuminate.

My own work has always sought to understand the dynamic, often brutal, processes of *cumulative causation*. We observe how poverty breeds more poverty, how discrimination entrenches itself, how the absence of opportunity constricts the very possibility of advancement. These are not static states, but unfolding dramas driven by a host of interconnected forces: our institutions, our ingrained beliefs, and crucially, the explicit and implicit *value premises* that guide our collective action, or inaction.

Neoclassical orthodoxy, with its elegant but often sterile models of equilibrium, too readily dismisses these messy, real-world entanglements. It pretends to be value-free, but this is a pretense that masks a tacit acceptance of the status quo, a *de facto* endorsement of existing power structures and their attendant injustices. A truly scientific economics, if such a thing is even conceivable, must be upfront about its normative foundations. We must declare our *value premises* – for me, a commitment to social justice, to eradicating poverty and inequality – and then rigorously trace the *cumulative causation* that either advances or obstructs these aims.

To understand, for instance, the persistent disparities that afflict so many nations, we cannot simply look at marginal utility or aggregate demand. We must examine the *institutional inertia*, the entrenched prejudices, the very…

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Gunnar Myrdal’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.