ABSTRACT
Gunnar Myrdal has come to occupy a special place in the conscience of the educated American. It is a position derived in large part from his monumental study of the American Negro, An American Dilemma — the closest work a cultivated European has produced comparable to De Tocqueville's Democracy in America. The reader is given a "balanced" potpourri of observations, theories, conjectures, and speculations. Much could be forgiven on the basis of the fact that these are lectures intended for oral delivery. The underlying theme is that the American economy exhibits relative stagnation, that its record of economic development is highly unsatisfactory given the a continued high and rising level of unemployment, and that a prolonged consumer orientation leaves too little for saving and investment to keep the economy growing quickly. For all of his erudition, Myrdal seems singularly uninformed on the latest social science findings, either that or he is sufficiently unimpressed to bother with them.
