He wished to defend the underdogs in society, which meant that he always nurtured an interest in income distribution and its developments. He attained a not insignificant influence on the shaping of economic policy through his writings and not least through his close contacts with the then minister of finance Ernst Wigfors and with the central bank. As mentioned, Lindahl was an advocate of Davidsson's norm and feared the emergence of Wicksell's cumulative processes. This interest in price-level developments led him to anxiously follow the trends in the consumer price index which he had devised for the Riksbank, and he often related how terrified he had been when price levels rose by more than .2 percent in one month in the late 1930s. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that price hikes of more than three percent per annum would in the long run spell the end of the world.
Time is a great teacher.
His arrival clearly augmented the Department's resources. True, Palander was not as well know as Lindahl either inside or outside Sweden's boundaries, but he had a very good name as a scholar, not least as an proponent of the poorly represented mathematical school. There is general agreement that Palander was a sharp-witted economist with exceptional powers when it came to criticising the work of others. His foremost work was his dissertation, which treats the theory of location. That opus earned him international fame.