Profile Major Works Resources

Robert Aaron Gordon, 1908-1978.


Macroeconomist at UC Berkeley.

Born in Washington DC and raised in North Carolina, Robert Aaron Gordon obtained his B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1928 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1934.  In 1938, he joined the economics department at the University of California-Berkeley.  Aaron Gordon (he preferred to go by his second name) was arguably the leading figure in the Berkeley department until his retirement in 1976.

R.A. Gordon was trained in the American Institutionalist tradition, and his two major works - on the corporation (1945) and on business cycles (1952) - were produced in that vein.  Nonetheless, Gordon embraced the Keynesian Revolution in many aspects.  Gordon sat on President Kennedy's commission on unemployment, and was the main author of its 1962 report. Gordon was a leader of the counter-reaction against the Monetarist upsurge in the 1970s   Gordon's main research focus was on unemployment and its measurement.

Robert Aaron Gordon was the husband of economist Margaret S. Gordon and father of economists Robert J. Gordon and David A. Gordon, earning the Gordons the monicker "the "Flying Wallendas of economics".

 

  

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Major Works of Robert Aaron Gordon

  • Business Leadership in the Large Corporation, 1945
  • Dynamics of Economic Activity, 1947
  • Business Fluctuations, 1952
  • Higher Education for Business, with J.E. Howell, 1959.
  • (main author) Measuring Employment and Unemployment, 1962
  • "Has Structural Unemployment Worsened?", 1964, Industrial Relations
  • (Editor), 1966, Prosperity and Unemployment, with M.S. Gordon
  • (Editor), 1967, Toward a Manpower Policy.
  • The Goal of Full Employment, 1967
  • "Unemployment Patterns with 'Full Employment'", 1968, Industrial Relations
  • 1969, in Bronfenbrenner, editor,, Is the Business Cycle Obsolete?
  • "How obsolete is the business cycle?", 1970, National Affairs [pdf]
  • Economic Growth and Instability: The American record, 1974
  • "A Skeptical Look at the "Natural Rate" Hypothesis", 1979, in Theory for Economic Efficiency.

 
HET

 
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Resources on  Robert A. Gordon

  • "Robert A. Gordon, 1908-1978" by Joseph A. Pechman, Brookings [pdf]
  • R.A. Gordon obituary at Calisphere
  • Gordon obituary at NY Times

 

 
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