David Gordon (economist)

Early life and education

Born in Washington, D.C. Gordon attended high school in Berkeley, California before graduating from Harvard University with a B.A. in economics in 1965.{{cite web|url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-03-22-mn-50079-story.html|title= David Gordon; Economist and Author|date=March 22, 1996|website=Los Angeles Times|publisher=Los Angeles Times Communications LLC (Nant Capital)|accessdate=May 19, 2025}} His parents, Robert Aaron Gordon and Margaret S. Gordon, were both economics professors at the University of California, Berkeley. His father served as the president of the American Economic Association in 1975, and his mother specialized in employment and social welfare policy. His brother, Robert J. Gordon, is a macroeconomist.

Gordon was associated with the New U.S. School of Radical Political Economy in the mid 1960s. As a graduate student of economics at Harvard in the late 1960s, he worked as a research assistant, evaluating Great Society programs The work included studies relating to chronically unemployed and low-income populations in Oakland, California, and Boston. In 1965, Gordon and other Harvard students founded a civil rights newspaper, The Southern Courier, in Atlanta. He completed a doctoral thesis named Class, Productivity, and the Ghetto and earned his PhD in economics in 1971. From 1970 to 1973, he worked as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, then located in New York City. In 1973, he joined the Graduate Faculty in the Economics Department at the New School for Social Research, where he continued to teach until he died in 1996.

Gordon was a founding member of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE). URPE has been described as an alternative professional organisation for left-wing political economists. Since 1998, the Review of Radical Political Economics has published an annual David Gordon Memorial Lecture. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Political Economy Research Institute is housed in Gordon Hall, named in honour of Gordon and Glen Gordon (no relation).

Work

Gordon’s research from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s has been described as falling into three broad periods. From the late 1960s through the late 1970s, he worked mainly in labour economics, focusing on segmented labour markets, often in collaboration with Richard Edwards and Michael Reich. During the 1980s, he analysed the long-term development of the U.S. economy and, with Samuel Bowles and Thomas Weisskopf, developed a historical and institutional approach to macroeconomic analysis linked to economic policy proposals. From the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, he developed a neo-Marxian model of the U.S. macroeconomy and extended his work on the relationship between workplace organisation, managerial supervision, and labour outcomes in the United States.

Labour economics

As a graduate student, Gordon combined some of his own findings with related work by other economists to write Theories of Poverty and Underemployment (1971), a book that surveyed alternative approaches to problems of urban poverty. His best-known contributions to labour economics challenged the mainstream economic assumption of a unified labour market and argued instead for the recognition of multiple labour markets separated by deep, historically shaped divisions along racial, gender, and class lines.

He wrote of this hypothesis that "...at any point in history, the prevailing and constantly evolving system of social and economic institutions defines and maintains class distinctions. It might be further assumed that these class distinctions change in such a way as to maximize the advantage of those in control of the institutions. At the most general level, it would envisage that individual labor market outcomes are determined primarily by those characteristics along which class distinctions are made, and only secondarily by those characteristics to which economists usually attribute productivity.". However, he did not believe that class differences meant that the interests of ordinary people are always opposed to those of the upper classes, arguing that more democratic and egalitarian economic policies are in the interest of everyone. Gordon's joint research with Edwards and Reich in this area culminated in the publication of their co-authored book, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labour in the United States (1982).

Macroeconomic analysis and economic policy

In 1979, Gordon became co-chair of a commission on economic problems set up by the Progressive Alliance, a political coalition of more than 200 organizations representing labour, citizens, civil rights, and women's organizations. He felt that a new and overarching analysis of the U.S. economy was needed in order to understand the macroeconomic travails of the time and to guide proposals for change. This led to more than a decade of collaboration with Samuel Bowles and Thomas Weisskopf in which they first analysed the post-World War II boom of the U.S. economy as well as its subsequent unravelling and then formulated policy proposals to develop a more democratic, egalitarian, and successful U.S. economy in the future. Gordon, Bowles, and Weisskopf’s account of the post-war boom emphasized institutional and political factors such as sustained full employment during the middle-to-late 1960s, the erosion of U.S. world hegemony, and the rise of environmental and other citizen movements.

They argue that the boom ended because the institutional structures could no longer restrain the claims of rivals (both domestic and international) against the profits of U.S. corporations and that a new and more just social and economic order would be needed to restore prosperity. Gordon's work with Bowles and Weisskopf led to numerous econometric and historical studies on the dynamics of stagflation, the slowdown of productivity growth, and the determinants of profitability and investment, which were published in a series of articles in economic journals. The collaboration also led to two co-authored books for a general audience, namely Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (1983) and After the Waste Land: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (1991).

Macroeconomic modelling and labour control

One of Gordon's most important contributions to the collaborative research he carried out on labour economics and macroeconomic trends was his historical and institutional understanding of the process of economic growth and development. His approach sought to explain successive booms and crises in a capitalist economy in terms of successive institutional frameworks or, to use the Neo-Marxian term, successive social structures of accumulation (SSAs). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he sought to use statistical methodology to conduct a rigorous test of this historical-institutional approach. His project involved the specification of four distinct yet comparable econometric models of the U.S. economy, based respectively on the neoclassical, the classical Marxian, the post-Keynesian, and his own Neo-Marxian "left-structuralist" perspective—the latter representing a formalization of the SSA approach. In a comparison of the four models’ forecasting performance, Gordon reported that the left-structuralist model produced the lowest forecast errors.

During his last five years, Gordon focused on completing an analysis of the top-heavy bureaucratic structure of U.S. corporations and its relationship to the decline in the real wages of U.S. workers since the mid-1970s—two phenomena on which he had focused attention in his earlier work. This effort culminated in the publication of ''Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial 'Downsizing''' (1996) two months after his death. In this book, Gordon presented quantitative evidence challenging conventional views on U.S. corporate management and its relations with workers.

He argues that U.S. corporations have gone "mean" rather than "lean", employing more managers and supervisors per worker than ever before. He attributes the long-term squeeze on U.S. workers' real wages not so much to increasing international economic integration and increasingly complex technology as to corporate executives' choice of a "low-road" business strategy, involving the use of discipline and negative sanctions, rather than a "high-road" strategy, emphasizing positive incentives to motivate work. Gordon concluded the book with a chapter devoted to policy recommendations designed to promote more democratic and cooperative high-road approaches to labour management. Colleague Robert Pollin wrote about Gordon's theory, noting that "substantial productivity gains are attainable through operating a less hierarchical workplace and building strong democratic internal labour market institutions... through changing power relationships at the workplace and the decision-making process through which investment decisions get made, labour and the left can then also achieve a more egalitarian social structure of accumulation".

Death

Gordon died of congestive heart failure while waiting for a heart transplant in Manhattan, New York City, on 16 March 1996, aged 51.

Works

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References

References

1. Bowles, Sam. (1999-03-01). "David M. Gordon: Radical Political Economist and Activist (1944-1996)". Review of Radical Political Economics.
2. "Past Presidents".
3. Lee, Carol. (September 2020). "Margaret Shaughnessy Gordon {{!}} UC Berkeley Economics".
4. (January 1998). "David M. Gordon: Economist and Public Intellectual (1944-1996)". [[Oxford University Press]].
5. "History".
6. Pollin, Robert. (1998-09-01). "The "Reserve Army of Labor" and the "Natural Rate of Unemployment": Can Marx, Kalecki, Friedman, and Wall Street All Be Wrong?". Review of Radical Political Economics.
7. "Gordon Hall & Crotty Hall".
8. Institute for New Economic Thinking. "The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA)".
9. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). "Economics—A Half Century of Research 1920–1970".
10. "Segmented Work, Divided Workers {{!}} American history: general interest". [[University of Cambridge]].
11. Bowles, Samuel. (1998). "David M. Gordon: Economist and Public Intellectual (1944-1996)". The Economic Journal.
12. Gordon, David M.. (1996). "Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial Downsizing". Free Press.
13. (1998). "David M. Gordon: Economist and Public Intellectual (1944–1996)". [[Oxford University Press]].
14. Uchitelle, Louis. (March 19, 1996). "David M. Gordon, 51, a Leader Among Left-Wing Economists".