Robert JamesGordon is an American economist. He is the Stanley G. Harris Professor of the Social Sciences at Northwestern University and one of the world's leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and long-term economic growth.[2]
He is known for his work on U.S. economic growth, productivity, inflation, and price measurement. His research has had significant influence on both academic scholarship and economic policy, particularly in the areas of historical productivity analysis, supply shocks, and inflation measurement.[3][4]
Family
Gordon is a member of a family of economists. Both his parents Robert Aaron and Margaret earned distinction independently, each contributing to economic knowledge with a view to real practical benefit for society, as did his brother David, himself more of a radical.[5]
Also his father is the namesake of the "Gordon Report" which proposed reforms for the computation of the unemployment rate by the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. He currently resides in Evanston, Illinois with his wife Julie, who was the Executive Director of the Econometric Society from 1975 to 2005.[7][2]
Education
Gordon graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. from Harvard University in 1962. He then attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and received his B.A. in 1964 (1st Class Honours). He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1967 with a dissertation titled Problems in the Measurement of Real Investment in the U.S. Private Economy.[2]
Gordon earned a B.A. in economics from Harvard University in 1962, graduating magna cum laude and receiving the Allyn Young Prize. He studied at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, completing an A.B. in 1964 and an A.M. in 1969 with first-class honors in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. At Oxford he also won the George Webb Medley Senior Prize in Economics.[3]
He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967, supported by National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation fellowships. His doctoral dissertation, Problems in the Measurement of Real Investment in the U.S. Private Economy, reflected an early interest in issues of productivity and measurement.[8]
Since 1968, Gordon has also been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where he has contributed to programs on economic fluctuations, growth, productivity, and international finance.[14] He has served on the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee since 1978 and co-chaired the International Seminar on Macroeconomics (1978–94). He has also been a research fellow of the Centre on Economic Policy Research (London) since 1983.[15]
Gordon has been active in professional service, including long tenure as treasurer of the Econometric Society (1975–2005), membership on the editorial boards of leading journals, and advisory roles for U.S. and international institutions such as the Congressional Budget Office, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the “Boskin Commission” on the Consumer Price Index.[16][17]
From 1995 to 1997, he served on the Boskin Commission to assess the accuracy of the United States Consumer Price Index (CPI), having written the definitive criticism of CPI inflation overstatement in 1990. He was also a member of the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the NBER, which determines when recessions start and end, for more than three decades.[18]
He argues that the “Great Inventions” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries electricity, the internal combustion engine, clean water and sanitation, chemicals, and modern communications drove unprecedented productivity growth between 1920 and 1970.[20]
Gordon also highlights structural “headwinds” that are likely to reduce future U.S. growth, including demographic change, rising debt, inequality, slowing increase of educational attainment, retreat from globalization, and environmental challenges.[21][22]
His work clarified policy trade-offs during stagflation and highlighted the amplifying role of wage indexation. He introduced the now-standard distinction between “headline” and “core” inflation, showing that the latter provides a better measure of underlying price trends. His numerous subsequent papers on inflation introduced the roles of flexible exchange rates and the time-varying natural rate of unemployment (or NAIRU).[24]
Productivity growth and World War II
In a 1969 study, Gordon reinterpreted the surge of mid-20th-century productivity growth by documenting that most wartime capital investment was government-financed but omitted from official statistics.[25] This work invented the concept of “GOPO” capital (Government Owned, Privately Operated). Correcting this bias, he described productivity between 1929 and 1948 as “One Big Wave,” reshaping historical accounts of America’s golden age of growth.[26]
Price measurement
Gordon’s book The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices (1990) provided detailed evidence that official price indexes overstated inflation by underestimating quality improvements in products such as automobiles, aircraft, computers, and home appliances.[27] His hedonic price indexes influenced revisions in government statistical methods and were central to the work of the Boskin Commission (1995–97). Subsequent papers measured bias in price indexes for housing and apparel. He also introduced a new methodology for measuring GDP prior to World War 2.[28]
Selected works
Books
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Princeton University Press. 2016. ISBN978-0691147727.
Gordon, Robert J.; Pelkmans, Jacques (1979). Challenges to interdependent economics: the industrial West in the coming decade. 1980s project studies / Council on Foreign Relations. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. ISBN978-0-07-023810-7.
Friedman, Milton (1990). Gordon, Robert J. (ed.). Milton Friedman's monetary framework: a debate with his critics (5. [print.]ed.). Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-26408-0.
De Menil, George; Gordon, Robert J., eds. (1991). International volatility and economic growth: the first ten years of the International Seminar on Macroeconomics. Amsterdam: North-Holland. ISBN978-0-444-89284-3.
Bresnahan, Timothy F.; Gordon, Robert J. (eds.). The Economics of New Goods. National Bureau of Economic Research Studies in Income and Wealth. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
