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David Gordon (economist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Gordon
Born(1944-05-04)May 4, 1944
DiedMarch 16, 1996(1996-03-16) (aged 51)[1]
NationalityAmerican
Academic career
InstitutionGraduate Faculty, New School for Social Research
FieldMacroeconomics, political economy, labor economics
School or
tradition
Neo-Marxian economics
Alma materHarvard University
InfluencesKarl Marx, Samuel Bowles

David M. Gordon (May 4, 1944 – March 16, 1996) was an American economist and Professor of Economics at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. He founded the Institute for Labor Education and Research in 1975 and later the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis in New York City. Gordon worked to disseminate progressive economic ideas to the general public and to contribute to the development of a left-political movement in the United States. Gordon's work dealt mainly with discrimination and labor market segmentation. He coined the term social structure of accumulation which gave rise to an extensive body of work on the impact of political, social and economic institutions on long-term investment and growth.

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  • 'The Road to Serfdom' at 70 | David Gordon
  • Apriorism and Positivism in the Social Sciences | David Gordon
  • Behavioral Economics: Tools - Anya Samek

Transcription

Thank you. I'm delighted each time I speak at the Mises Institute so I'm delighted this time. What I wanted to do is although Road to Serfdom is an extremely popular book; it sold a great many copies, many people find the book rather abstract, at least in certain parts. What I wanna do is concentrate on what I think is the central argument to the book which is found in chapter 5 The Planning of Democracy and chapter 6 Planning in the Rule of Law. Now, in order to understand what I take to be the central argument of the book, I think we have to see what is the situation that Hyatt confronted when he was writing Road to Serfdom. He was especially concerned that many intellectual people at the time some of whom were his colleagues, were saying that the old liberties, the liberties that word characteristic classical liberalism such as the freedom speech, freedom of religion, and right to own property, were really either outdated or if not outdated were not enough that we needed new liberties. In one footnote in the book Hayek quotes the famous American historian Carl Becker who was the author of a famous work on decoration of independence, who had a book called New Liberties for Old. So what the idea was of the people who said this that old liberties of classical liberalism weren't enough, their argument was something like this they said, "well suppose you have the freedom of speech. You have the freedom to own property, you have the right. You can live your life and as you want, so long as you don't interfere with other people or violate their rights. Then what happens if you don't have any money, or you're very poor, or you suffer from handicaps, you have all these problems. You won't be able to get anywhere. You'll have all these abstract liberties. This is very good, but you're not going to get anywhere. It's necessary that we have each person has to have the ability- has to be given the means by which he can live a good life. And this is- Thomas had mentioned contemporary relevance, but this is a very influential idea today. For example, we find in the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has what he called the capabilities appropriate- Exactly what Hayek was talking about he said was what we should do is each person has to be given the capabilities so that he can lead a good life. If he doesn't have- say if the person is handicapped: he needs special benefits that should be provided to him. So, Hayek is very opposed to this and he says one most dangerous ideas is the substitution of power for liberty. The view that instead of having liberty in the sense that each person is free to lead his own life, what we need instead is that each person should have a certain power to be able to lead a good life. And what is it that Hayek finds especially dangerous about this idea, why is he opposed to? It seems on the surface, of course you wouldn't think this coming from a libertarian back ground, but it seemed on the surface, well isn't this a good idea, don't we need to have- if we want lead a good life don't we need to have the means to do so, so what's wrong with giving people the means to lead a good life if they don't have one? This is, say John Rawls's, the most influential of all contemporary books on political philosophy, Theory of Justice came out in 1971, he says you have to be seen between liberty and the worth of liberty. He says what good is Liberty if you don't have the means to make use of your liberty. So what Hayek says the danger is if you say this, how is it supposed to be realized? How are we supposed to give each person the means to live a good life? And to do this, he says, to do this this will mean planning the economy. That's to say directing the economy in a centralized way, saying instead of it having the free market in which people each person is leading his own life people are interacting on the market, we'll have the government telling people what to do. We'll have the government say engaged in redistribution so people can have the means to lead a good life. Now the fundamental problem Hayek finds in this, he said if you have some new that the government is going to have a comprehensive economic plan this supposes that there's a set of values that the government is realizing. There's a particular set of values that the government is trying to achieve because say the government says people with certain kinds of needs should get extra money, well this supposes that the government values that. So, Hayek has the idea, he says that supposing there's some kind comprehensive arrangement of all the different values the government is trying to achieve that through its plan, but the problem with this is that in a large society there isn't agreement among people on particular set of values. People have very different values, and they won't agree with the government on the particular set of values it chooses. Or, at least, a lot of people won't agree. So, then what happens if that's the case, that there is a government says here's the set of values we're trying to achieve. A lot of people don't agree with this. Then he says the government will have to start telling people what to do. The government will have to say what you should, do you must do this. We see this today say, in all the recent stories about Obamacare. The government is telling doctors you must charge such in such amounts for you services and telling people you have to purchase certain kinds of health care, you can't purchase the kind you want. We see how this directly effects people values. Say, church groups that don't believe in contraception had very difficult times in not putting this in their health plan. The government is telling people specifically what to do, and this Hayek says, is inevitable because in economic planning the government has to operate from some sort of set of values. Now, he says in order to preserve liberty we can't operate in this fashion where the government is telling particularly people what to do. Now, one-way- the Rothbardian way with dealing with this would just be say people have certain natural rights, but Hayek in his work, like John Stuart Mill who greatly influence him, tended to avoid the language of rights. What he said instead was he apealed to the idea of, what he called, the rule of law. And what he said was given that there's this inevitable disagreement among people on values, then the only real way in which people can preserve freedom is that laws are restricted to general state general requirements that don't refer to specific people, they just accept general requirements and what should be done. So, given that there are these general requirements, each person is then free to live his own life. He just has to knows what the general laws are and then he can try do realize his life according to whatever values he wants. And if that's the case, if we have a system like that, then people will operate in a free-market and won't have a comprehensive plan, but they'll be a market instead. So what Hayek was doing then, he's contrasting this notional of law is general, just giving allowing people to do what they want within the frame of general laws and law is command to specific people to do something. So, he's saying look, if you favor this idea of liberty is power, in this very influential idea that said people have to be provided with means to achieved a good life, then this will be involved this notional planning which gives you law specific commands to people and this is inconsistent with liberty. So, then after he got this analysis, it wasn't just a theoretical point for him. He wanted to apply it to the situation- the contemporary situation when he wrote 1944 of course Britain and America were in a world war with Nazi Germany. So, what he wanted to do was to argue that the Nazi system and also- we didn't discuss it as much- the communist system they both had their origins in this same view that he was criticizing as to say the classical liberal idea of freedom had to be replaced by this new idea that the government should engage in comprehensive planning. And so at the time he was writing the dominant explanation of fascism and Nazism was a Marxist one that said the Nazi system is the highest, final stage of capitalism. So, Hayek said no this is wrong that socialism is really- the Nazi system is really the outcome of socialism, and this is what created the greatest controversy in in the book especially in Britain and America. That he said that the ideas of the left of the people who were considered progressive thinkers who would view themselves as anti-fascist, were really identical with those that had lead to fascism and Nazism. That those systems were also based on the notion of comprehensive planning, and that once you have comprehensive planning, this will lead inevitably to denying people Liberty because you'll be telling people what to do. And he says that there's some the socialists, at one time socialists, who said they were in favor of Liberty, they just want to extend Liberty to others, but he's able to quote various socialist writers in admitting this. For example, one of his particular targets in the book was someone who is a professor at the LSC at the same time Hayek himself was. Carl Monheim who was a Hungarian sociologist who wrote largely in German and then came to the LSC after the rise of the Nazis. So, Hayek quotes very effectively, from him Monheim's statements that Liberty isn't all that important, what's really important is that we have to have planning, this is the key to things. And incidentally Monheim thought that Hayek was in a conspiracy against him. He complained that Hayek and his allies were persecuting him, but all Hayek was doing was very effectively quoting him. I guess he didn't like that. There was one other critique who was also a professor of political science, Herbert Finer who wrote a reply to Hayek in a short book called the Road to Reaction, in which he calls the book Road to Serfdom, the reactionaries Mein Kampf. Well, Hayek wasn't very happy about that. I think he broke off personal relations with Finer. He told me at that what Finer was really upset by was that he had a quarrel with Harold Laski who was professor of political science at the LSC who had views diametrically opposed to Hayek. So, Hayek said well he attacked him, but he was really angry at Laski, but and took it out on Hayek instead. So, the socialists generally didn't take Hayek's message in very good spirit, but they really didn't have an answer to it because I think Hayek could show very effectively that it wasn't a matter of what they thought they were aiming for. Someone had thought they were trying to advance freedom because their policies inevitably involved directing people what to do, they were inconsistent with freedom. I'll just end up one point Hayek has I think also very good point in the book, is that he says in this so-called new idea that the socialist had of freedom, they were in effect going back to the conservatism of the old regime, which was one in telling people what to do and distrustful of human freedom. He points out say the parallels between the socialists and policies of Otto von Bismarck who's not usually viewed as a left-wing progressive in Germany. So, what Hayek is is really arguing is that the movement for socialism- the so called new freedom that's Socialism's going to give is not really freedom, but it turned progress toward totalitarianism and return to the past societies from which classical liberalism was trying to liberate people. Thank you.

Biography

Gordon was born in Washington, D.C., grew up and went to high school in Berkeley, California and spent his college years at Harvard University, where he was awarded a B.A. in economics in 1965. His father Robert Aaron Gordon was President of the American Economic Association. His mother Margaret S. Gordon was well known for her contributions to the economics of employment and social welfare policy. His brother Robert J. Gordon is a prominent macroeconomist.

As a graduate student of economics at Harvard in the late 1960s, Gordon worked as a research assistant evaluating Great Society programs targeting the hard-core unemployed and was active in the development of the new U.S. school of radical political economy. He completed a doctoral thesis on "Class, Productivity, and the Ghetto" and earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1971. From 1970 to 1973, he served as a research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research, then located in New York City. In 1973, he joined the Economics Department at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he continued to teach until his untimely death—from congestive heart failure—at the age of 51.

Gordon's career was marked both by an extraordinary range of academic contributions to the field of economics and by his continual commitment to develop and to make available to the general public, economic analyses that could support the work of political activists working for social justice. 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 as well as the founding of the Institute for Labor Education and Research—subsequently renamed the Center for Democratic Alternatives—in New York City. Gordon Hall is the home of the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute.

Work

Gordon's progressive political commitments were the basic reason for his research activity and determined both its major themes and the manner in which he presented his findings. He addressed most of his research to economic issues of importance to the average person and to workers in particular. He disseminated his research findings not only to professional colleagues in economics journals, but also to a wide popular audience in a highly readable style. In his life and in his work as an economist, Gordon exemplified the waning tradition of the public intellectual.

Gordon's work over the three decades since he began graduate study can be divided into three periods, during which he addressed different sets of issues. 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 an historical and institutional approach to macroeconomic analysis that would yield progressive economic policy proposals. Finally from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, Gordon worked to develop a neo-Marxian model of the U.S. macroeconomy and brought to a conclusion his ongoing analysis of the implications of widespread bureaucratic supervision of American workplaces.

Labor 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 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. Gordon's joint research with Edwards and Reich in this area culminated in the publication of their co-authored and widely cited book, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (1982).[citation needed]

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 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. In brief, 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 economics 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 modeling and labor control

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 own left-structuralist model emerged the winner.

Gordon's last five years were devoted also to 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 two months after his death of Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial 'Downsizing' (1996). In this book, Gordon refutes with an impressive array of quantitative evidence much of the conventional wisdom about 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. Always concerned to use understanding of the world in order to change it for the better, Gordon concluded the book with a chapter devoted to policy recommendations designed to promote more democratic and cooperative high-road approaches to labor management.

Works

References

Notes
  1. ^ Bowles, Samuel; Weisskopf, Thomas (1998). "David M. Gordon: Economist and Public Intellectual (1944–1996)". The Economic Journal. 108 (446): 153–164. doi:10.1111/1468-0297.00278.
Further reading
  • Boshey, Heather; Pressman, Steven (2009). "The Economic Contributions of David M. Gordon". Leading contemporary economists : economics at the cutting edge. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-77501-9.

External links

This page was last edited on 24 November 2023, at 10:36
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