David Gordon (economist)

David M. Gordon (May 4, 1944 – March 16, 1996) was an American economist and professor. As a graduate professor of economics at The New School for Social Research, Gordon founded the Institute for Labor Education and Research and the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis in New York City.^[1]

Born in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1944,^[2] Gordon attended high school in Berkeley, California, before graduating from Harvard University with a B.A. in economics in 1965.^[3] His parents, Robert Aaron Gordon and Margaret S. Gordon, were both economics professors at the University of California, Berkeley.^[4] His father served as president of the American Economic Association in 1975,^[5] and his mother specialized in employment and social welfare policy.^[6] His brother, Robert J. Gordon, is a prominent macroeconomist.^[7]

Gordon was active in the development of the new U.S. school of radical political economy of the mid 1960s amid the reforms of the Lyndon Johnson administration. As a graduate student of economics at Harvard in the late 1960s, he worked as a research assistant, evaluating Great Society programs targeting chronically unemployed and extremely impoverished populations in Oakland, California and Boston.^[4] In 1965, Gordon joined with other Harvard students to found a civil rights newspaper, The Southern Courier in Atlanta.^[8] He completed a doctoral thesis on "Class, Productivity, and the Ghetto," and earned his PhD in economics in 1971. From 1970 to 1973, he was 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 his death in 1996.^[3]

Gordon's work encompassed both academic research and publications aimed at non-specialist audiences. His academic contributions are reflected in numerous books and articles published in professional journals as well as in his founding and directorship of the Center for Economic Policy Analysis. His contributions to the development of a progressive political movement in the United States include many policy papers, newsletters, op-ed pieces, radio and TV interviews, and frequent participation in public discussion forums. He was also a founding member of the Union for Radical Political Economics,^[8] an "alternative professional organization for left-wing political economists and an intellectual home for academics, policy-makers, and activists who are interested in participating in a left-wing intellectual debate on theoretical and policy issues."^[9] Since 1998, the Review of Radical Political Economics has published an Annual David Gordon Memorial Lecture in honor of his "fundamental contributions in opening up a new research approach in political economy".^[10] Gordon Hall is the home of the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute, honoring Gordon as well as Glen Gordon (no relation), Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst.^[11]

David Gordon's work over the three decades following the start of his graduate studies can be divided into three periods, during which he addressed a range of different issues.^[4] From the late 1960s to the late 1970s, often working in collaboration with Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, he focused on labor economics and in particular, segmented labor markets. During the 1980s, he turned his attention to analysis of the long-term trajectory of the U.S. economy, working with Samuel Bowles and Thomas Weisskopf to develop a historical and institutional approach to macroeconomic analysis that would yield progressive economic policy proposals. Finally, from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, Gordon developed a neo-Marxian model of the U.S. macroeconomy and concluded his ongoing analysis of the implications of widespread bureaucratic supervision of American workplaces.

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 labor economics challenged the mainstream economic assumption of a unified labor market and argued instead for the recognition of multiple labor 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."^[12] In general, 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.^[4] 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 Labor in the United States (1982).^[13]

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 labor, citizens, civil rights, and women's organizations.^[4] 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 analyzed the post-World War II boom of the U.S. economy as well as its subsequent unraveling 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 unraveling of the postwar boom gives prominence to the institutional and political impact of 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).

One of Gordon's most important contributions to the collaborative research he carried out on labor 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. From a "forecasting tournament" among the four models, his left-structuralist model emerged as the winner.^[4]

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.^[4] 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 labor management.^[14] Colleague Robert Pollin wrote of Gordon's theory that "substantial productivity gains are attainable through operating a less hierarchical workplace and building strong democratic internal labor market institutions... through changing power relationships at the workplace and the decision-making process through which investment decisions get made, labor and the left can then also achieve a more egalitarian social structure of accumulation".^[10]

Gordon died from congestive heart failure while waiting for a heart transplant at the age of 51 in Manhattan on March 16, 1996.^[15][8]

• Gordon, David M. (1972). Theories of poverty and underemployment; orthodox, radical, and dual labor market perspectives. Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0669892680.
• Gordon, David M.; Reich, Michael; Edwards, Richard (1982). Segmented work, divided workers: the historical transformation of labor in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521237215.
• Gordon, David M.; Bowles, Samuel; Weisskopf, Thomas E. (1983). Beyond the waste land: a democratic alternative to economic decline. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385183451.
  • Also as Gordon, David M.; Bowles, Samuel; Weisskopf, Thomas E. (1984). Beyond the wasteland: a democratic alternative to economic decline. London: Verso. ISBN 978-0860918233.
• Gordon, David M.; Bowles, Samuel; Weisskopf, Thomas E. (1990). After the waste land: a democratic economics for the year 2000. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc. ISBN 978-0873326452.
• Gordon, David M. (1996). Fat and mean: the corporate squeeze of working Americans and the myth of managerial "downsizing". New York: Martin Kessler Books. ISBN 978-0684822884.

• Boshey, Heather; Pressman, Steven (2009). The Economic Contributions of David M. Gordon - Leading contemporary economists : economics at the cutting edge. London and New York City: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-77501-9.

• Works by and about David M. Gordon on WorldCat.
• Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. Part of The New School.