David Gordon

David M. Gordon (May 4, 1944 – March 16, 1996) was an American economist and academic. Gordon served as a professor at The New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1995, he established the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA).

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. 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. 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 after Gordon and Glen Gordon (no relation).

Career According to published assessments, Gordon's research from the late 1960s until his death in 1996 progressed through areas of labour economics, institutional macroeconomic analysis, and neo-Marxian economic modeling. From the late 1960s through the late 1970s, he worked mainly in labor economics, focusing on segmented labor markets, often in collaboration with Richard Edwards and Michael Reich. During the 1980s, he analyzed the long-term development of the U.S. economy and, with Samuel Bowles and Thomas E. 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 labor outcomes in the United States. 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.

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 labor, citizens, civil rights, and women's organizations.

He argues that U.S. corporations have gone "mean" rather than "lean", employing more managers and supervisors per worker than ever before. 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 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".

Works

Also as