Alva Myrdal was born in Uppsala and grew up as the first child of a modest family, the daughter of Albert Reimer and Lowa Jonsson.

Myrdal's observation of the great social and economic disparities in the United States also led to an increased political commitment – "radical" was the term that she and her husband came to use to describe their shared political outlook They then moved to Geneva for further studies, where they started to so study the population decline that worried many Europeans during the interwar period.

The basic premise of Crisis in the Population Question is to find what social reforms are needed to allow for individual liberty (especially for women) while also promoting child-bearing, and encouraging Swedes to have children.

Consequently, she published the book Urban Children (1935), where she presented her ideas for a newly reformed Swedish preschool system.

With architect Sven Markelius, Myrdal designed Stockholm's cooperative Collective House in 1937, with an eye towards developing more domestic liberty for women.

A long-time prominent member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, in the late 1940s she became involved in international issues with the United Nations, appointed to head its section on welfare policy in 1949.

During the negotiations in Geneva, she played an extremely active role, emerging as the leader of the group of nonaligned nations which endeavored to bring pressure to bear on the two superpowers (US and USSR, respectively) to show greater concern for concrete disarmament measures.

Her experiences from the years spent in Geneva found an outlet in her book "The game of disarmament", in which she expresses her disappointment at the reluctance of the US and the USSR to disarm.

[5] Myrdal participated in the creation of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, becoming the first chairman of the governing board in 1966.

In 1983 Myrdal effectively ended the heated controversy over the future of Adolf Fredrik's Music School, "The AF-fight" (Swedish: AF-striden).