David M. Gordon: Pathbreaking Radical Political Economist

Nancy Breen

A chapter in Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology: Including a Symposium on David Gordon: American Radical Economist, 2022, vol. 40A, pp 5-34 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: David M. Gordon advanced labour economics with his theory of labour market segmentation, in which jobs rather than the marginal productivity of individual workers were the unit of analysis. He advanced economic historiography and macroeconomics by conceptualising social structures of accumulation – a framework built on the foundation of his institutionalist training and enriched by his study of Marxist economics. By appropriating methods from other social science disciplines into econometrics, he augmented empirical analysis in economics. He was a founding member of the Union of Radical Political Economics and its journal, the Review of Radical Political Economics – that advanced and promoted heterodox, radical, and Marxist economists in the United States. His contributions to economics, to organised labour, and to the New School for Social Research, where I studied with him, were stunning. Part 1 lays out some context about the New School Graduate Faculty where Gordon taught. Part 2 explores what historical forces, including his family, led to his expansive creativity. Part 3 summarises how he expanded labour economics to include the relations as well as the technology of production, linked his understanding of the production process to a historical materialist view of labour in the United States, then extended that to econometric analyses of the US macroeconomy. Part 4 presents a bibliometric analysis to provide some idea of the impact of his work. I end with some concluding remarks.

Keywords: David M. Gordon; labor market segmentation; social structures of accumulation; New School for Social Research; United States; B. History of economic thought; methodology and heterodox approaches; C. mathematical and quantitative methods; J. labor and demographic economics; N. economic history; economic development; innovation; technological change and growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rhetzz:s0743-41542022000040a003

DOI: 10.1108/S0743-41542022000040A003

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