On 11/30/20 10:18 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/world/europe/jan-myrdal-dead.html
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/world/europe/jan-myrdal-dead.html>
Published Nov. 19, 2020
Updated Nov. 29, 2020
Jan Myrdal, a radical Swedish writer who spurned the liberal politics
of his famous Nobel-winning parents and embraced Communism, Marxism
and Maoism, died on Oct. 30 in Varberg, Sweden. He was 93.
His death was announced by Cecilia Cervin, a former chairman of the
Jan Myrdal Society, a group dedicated to preserving his extensive book
collection.
Mr. Myrdal traveled and wrote widely, specializing in Asia. He
depicted life in a small Chinese village during the Chinese
Revolution, and his writings extolled the virtues of authoritarians.
He abhorred the damaging effects of Western imperialism on developing
countries.
But perhaps nothing in his career as a polemicist garnered him as much
attention as the books he wrote expressing his distaste for his
parents, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. The elder Mr. Myrdal was an economist
and sociologist who shared the 1974 Nobel in economic science with
Friedrich A. von Hayek and wrote “An American Dilemma: The Negro
Problem and Modern Democracy” (1944), a pioneering study of race.
As leading lights of the Swedish social democracy, Gunnar and Alva
Myrdal played a major role in developing the policies that would lead to
the monstrous punishment of the weak and the poor. Their theories were
hardly the stuff of the Third Reich. You will not find anything about
defending Nordic purity, etc. Instead it would be described as
“pronatalism”, a belief that the government had a duty to promote family
growth in a society that was experiencing falling birthrates despite
Wicksell’s neo-Malthusianism. For the Myrdals, poverty was not a breeder
of large families, which is often thought to be the case. Instead Sweden
faced a problem of demographic decline since the Victorian era, one that
the Myrdals interpreted as the outcome of inadequate means. So the
answer was to shore up the nuclear family through public housing, income
supplements, subsidized medical care—all the things we associate with
the modern welfare state. They were also strong supporters of birth
control but much more from the standpoint of women’s liberation than
neo-Malthusianism.
https://louisproyect.org/2015/07/17/swedish-socialism-and-eugenics/
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