Myrdal Urges Moral Foreign Aid

The U.S. must adopt a new "double standard" of discrimination in favor of poor nations if it is to aid, rather than plunder, underdeveloped countries, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal said last night.

Myrdal, a diplomat-scholar famed for his classic study of American race relations, An American Dilemna, outlined the political conclusions and solutions he had drawn from his three volume An Asian Drama in a speech sponsored by the Harvard Law School Forum in Sanders Theatre.

Speaking with a thick Swedish accent, Myrdal said that Asian attitudes and institutions are the biggest drawbacks to progress. Asian states are "soft," he said, "in that they demand so little of their citizens." He added that "the laws are full of loopholes that the vested interests can exploit and so corruption has been increasing."

"The main thing is what they (the poor nations) can do," he stressed, "but we can help." American foreign aid is destructive, he said, because it is given in loans attached to trade agreements which siphon off the country's capital and lower the quality of its imports.

Myrdal listed reform of the nations' population control programs, land distribution, and unequal economic systems as crucial to the task of building viable governments, but these measures could only come from within the nations, he said.

Americans must point to a new alliance with liberal elements; they must act on moral bases--out of compassion--because the alternative is fatal, Myrdal added.

"American diplomacy has been an instrument for stagnation."