Unless you hail from Sweden, you probably never heard of a guy by the name of Gunnar Myrdal.
He was a life-long technocrat, a do-gooder that lived off the dole of the Swedish taxpayer, and a dedicated socialist whose professional training was in economics. While he was a proto-Keynesian (a Keynesian before Keynes), what really separated him from hoi polloi was this: he was instrumental in establishing the Nobel Prize in Economics.
You see, before ol’ Alfred Nobel passed on into the Eternal abyss, he established a trust fund that bears his name. And from this fund, monetary awards are divvied up each year to recognize five different fields of inquiry, none of which is Economics.
That didn’t stop Gunnar though. Give and take, he shrewdly played the game of politics and convinced various governmental divisions in Sweden to approve a new award. He even got the Bank of Sweden - the world’s oldest central bank - to finance this new award, in Honor of Alfred Nobel (note: the Nobel trust fund is privately managed).
The prize got the go-ahead and was ultimately christened in 1969… however fewer than five years go by when one big conflict of interest arises: he is nominated and wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. Imagine that.
And that’s not the only twist — he actually shares it with an advocate of free-markets, F.A Hayek.
So, a socialist, whose publications promote Keynesianism, wins alongside someone whose laissez-faire theories are diametrically opposite to his. How much credibility does the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences have now? Oy vey!
I was reminded of these historical footnotes when I came across a tribute to Ludwig von Mises by columnist Lawrence Fertig:
Mirabile dictu, Gunnar Myrdal, who was the architect of interventionism and did much to promote the welfare state in Sweden, as in other parts of the world, had this to say: “The organized welfare state has gone mad … It (the strike) has become a class struggle, with judges, academics and civil servants seeing the lower classes creep up on them … It’s an impossible situation.”
There is a measure of poetic justice in the anguish of Gunnar Myrdal and the other academics in Sweden who promoted the equalitarian society, and are now hoist by their own petard.
Fertig’s essay was written in the spring of 1971. Mises dies in 1973. Myrdal wins the Nobel prize in 1974.
Doneski, right?
One last wrinkle, the Nobel Peace Prize. Oddly enough, the stereotypically statist-leaning Norwegian Nobel Committee is charged with awarding the Peace Prize each year (long story short, Norway once “belonged to” Sweden). Its five members are appointed by the interventionist-friendly Norwegian parliament.
In 1984 it went to Alva Myrdal. She was Gunnar’s wife and a life-long promoter of State intervention through a sundry of welfare schemes.
Phrase of the day: nepotistic kleptocrats.
I wouldn’t walk around New York, that’s for sure.
The friend that sent me that link notes that he himself has replaced his PDA with a Moleskin as well.
This is perhaps one of the weirdest video games I have ever seen — moreso because of who makes it and how they plan to use it as an evangelical tool.
I wonder, will there be cheat codes?
Remember those really really godawful commercials you watched as a kid? Thanks to the wonders of the internets, you can see all of them. Retrojunk.com does not just serve ads, but also public services announcements, tv shows and much much more!
Viva Sargent Slaughter and Doogie Howser!
Ever wonder what would happen if you fused a LearJet onto the chasis of a limousine? There truly is a market for everything.
Last week the world ended, or so readers of Slashdot thought. Reportedly, some up-to-no-good technocrats in China supposedly created their own DNS system. Nope, turns out that the story was misinterpreted somehow.
Quite the botching, wouldn’t you say?
Study: Viking Teeth Were Groovy:
Viking warriors filed deep grooves in their teeth, and they likely had to smile broadly to show them off, according to new finds in four major Viking Age cemeteries in Sweden.
Caroline Arcini of Sweden’s National Heritage Board analyzed 557 skeletons of men, women and children from between 800 and 1050 A.D. They discovered that 22 of the men bore deep, horizontal grooves across the upper front teeth.
“The marks are traces of deliberate dental modifications … they are so well-made that most likely they were filed by a person of great skill,” Arcini wrote in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Both Chris Rock and Bill Cosby are noted critics of what they see as systemic sophomoric tomfoolery in the “black community” which the metallic grill plays a role in.
Apparently the Vikings did something similar, although the dental work was a bit more permanent and probably a lot more painful. Damn that would hurt.
“You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound of your death.”
Classes at A&M are cancelled for Friday. The football game has been moved from Saturday to Thursday (gotta love the love of football in Texas, we’ll play no matter what). One of my professors recently taught at the University of Florida and has lived through a number of these… his recommendation to all of us, leave for Dallas.
For those unfamiliar with the geographical proximity of College Station and A&M to anything else: we are approximately, 95 miles north of Houston and 170 miles south of Dallas and 100 miles east of Austin.
The current trajectory has Rita hitting just west of Galveston/Houston from which it will then head north, passing close to the College Station area. So that means lots of puddles to splash in and good weather to fly kites.
And to give you an idea of the size this sucker is, someone on the Weather channel suggested that this was like a tornado the size of Georgia. That’s how we like things in Texas, big.
