Karl Gunnar Myrdal ( ; ; 6 December 1898 – 17 May 1987) was a Swedish economist and sociologist. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." When his wife, Alva Myrdal, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982, they became the fourth ever married couple to have won Nobel Prizes, and the first to win independent of each other (versus a shared Nobel Prize by scientist spouses). He is best known in the United States for his study of race relations, which culminated in his book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. The study was influential in the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court Decision Brown v. Board of Education. In Sweden, his work and political influence were important to the establishment of the Folkhemmet and the welfare state. Myrdal and his wife advocated for social engineering. Early life and education Myrdal was born on 6 December 1898, in Skattungbyn, Sweden, to Karl Adolf Pettersson (1876–1934), a building contractor, and his wife Anna Sofia Karlsson (1878–1965). He took the name Myrdal in 1914 after his ancestors' farm Myr in the province of Dalarna. There is a possibly apocryphal story about an interaction between him and Gustav Cassel, where Cassel was reported to say, "Gunnar, you should be more respectful to your elders, because it is we who will determine your promotion," and he replied, "Yes, but it is we who will write your obituaries." Gunnar Myrdal graduated with a law degree from Stockholm University in 1923 and a doctorate in economics in 1927. In June 1919, he met Alva Reimer, whom he married in October 1924 and had the first of their three children in 1927. Myrdal's PhD thesis, The Problem of Price Formation under Economic Change, had three parts: The Basics of the Dynamic Problem of Price Formation, The Problem of the Profit of the Enterprise, and The Optimal Mode of Construction and Change, the most mathematical of the three, where he studied equilibrium of price formation under dynamic conditions. In Gunnar Myrdal's doctoral dissertation, published in 1927, he examined the role of expectations in price formation. His analysis strongly influenced the Stockholm school. He built on Knut Wicksell's theories of cumulative process