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What role did the demographic argument play in the advent of the Swedish Welfare State? This paper studies the main thesis of the book Kris i befolkningsfrågan (1934) by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, which prepared the discursive ground of demography in Sweden. Compromising the predominance of a hygienism with biologist leanings and introducing a discussion about family policy within Swedish social democracy, its influence on reforms was limited before the war. The advent of the Welfare State in the middle of the 1950s is explained rather by socio-economic factors than by demographic arguments. However, after 1970, the intense demographic debate launched by the Myrdal’s in the 1930s with their "practical radicalism" underlay the important family policy reforms: parental leaves, spread of the public pre-school system, etc.