Margaret Gordon (economist)

Margaret S. Gordon (née Shaughnessy; September 4, 1910 – May 28, 1994) was an American economist who worked on employment, social security and welfare, poverty and the economics of higher education. She spent most of her career at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was associate director of the Institute of Industrial Relations from 1954 to 1969. From 1969 to 1979 she was associate director of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and its successor, the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, for which she drafted more than a dozen reports. She also served on federal advisory bodies, including President Lyndon B. Johnson's Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, and on the Berkeley City Council.

Early life and education

Margaret Shaughnessy was born on September 4, 1910, in Wabasha, Minnesota. Her father was a physician; both her parents had grown up in Ashland, Massachusetts, and the family moved back to the Boston area, to Framingham, in 1919. She received a BA in economics from Bryn Mawr College in 1931, spent 1933–34 at the London School of Economics working on her dissertation, and received an MA in 1933 and a PhD in 1935 from Radcliffe College. At Harvard she was influenced by Joseph Schumpeter and Gottfried Haberler, and her dissertation, "A Pre-war Cycle in British Trade, 1885–1896", like her first published paper (1940), first book (1941) and first major article (1946), dealt with international trade.

Career

Early career

No tenure-track positions were open to her after she finished her degree. Her biographer Joyce Jacobsen attributes this to the general scarcity of academic posts in the 1930s and to her sex. She was an instructor in economics at Wellesley College in 1935–36 and then a research fellow of Radcliffe College for three years. Her first book, Barriers to World Trade, a study of commercial policy, was published in 1941.

In 1936 she married the economist Robert Aaron Gordon, and in 1938 he accepted a tenure-track position at Berkeley. The university offered her no position, and an anti-nepotism rule would have prevented her from taking one in the economics department. Apart from work for the federal Office of Price Administration in 1942–43, she held no formal position from 1939 to 1950, although the university's Trade Regulation Project supported her research on international trade.

Institute of Industrial Relations

In 1950 she joined Berkeley's Institute of Industrial Relations as an assistant research economist, and she was its associate director from 1954 to 1969. A colleague later recalled that "everybody I ever talked to said Peg used to run IRLE". She was on the editorial board of the Institute's journal Industrial Relations from its founding in 1961 until 1982, serving as managing editor for its first two years.

Her research at the Institute covered unemployment and unemployment insurance, social security, the economics of aging, youth unemployment and employment opportunities for minority groups. Her book Employment Expansion and Population Growth: The California Experience, 1900–1950 (1954) was among the first analyses to conclude that California depended on military spending more than any other state. The Economics of Welfare Policies (1963) dealt mainly with social security and unemployment insurance in the United States, and in Occupational Disability and Public Policy (1963), which she edited with Earl F. Cheit, she contributed two chapters on foreign experience with industrial injury insurance. For Retraining and Labor Market Adjustment in Western Europe (1965) she travelled through Western Europe interviewing sources alongside her husband, who was studying full-employment policies. She also edited the proceedings of a 1965 national conference on poverty at Berkeley, Poverty in America, and, with her husband, Prosperity and Unemployment (1966). She lectured in Berkeley's School of Social Welfare from 1958 to 1971 and in the Department of Economics from 1969 to 1978.

Federal service

Gordon served on the Department of Labor's Advisory Committee on Unemployment Insurance (1962–64), the Social Security Administration's Advisory Committee on Research Development (1965–68) and the President's Task Force on Older Americans (1967–68). In 1968 President Johnson appointed her to the President's Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, known as the Heineman Commission, whose 1969 report Poverty Amid Plenty: The American Paradox reviewed federal welfare policy.

Carnegie Commission on Higher Education

In 1969 Clark Kerr, chairman of the newly formed Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, invited Gordon to become its associate director, a post she also held at its successor, the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, until 1979. The two bodies sponsored 120 studies and issued 40 reports, of which she drafted more than a dozen, on subjects including community colleges, the classification of institutions of higher education, affirmative action and student financial aid. Jacobsen judges the most influential to be Higher Education and the Nation's Health (1970), which she says was converted almost intact into the Health Manpower Act of 1972. Gordon was general editor of a series of monographs on youth education and employment in other countries, which culminated in her Youth Education and Unemployment Problems: An International Perspective (1979).

Several of her works addressed women in the labor market and in higher education, including the Carnegie Commission report Opportunities for Women in Higher Education (1973) and, with Clark Kerr, "University Behavior and Policies: Where Are the Women and Why?" (1978). In the concluding chapter of Higher Education and the Labor Market (1974), which she edited, she wrote: "As the only female contributor, I mildly chastised the authors, when we met for a discussion of our first drafts in the fall of 1971, on their exclusive preoccupation with data relating to men."

Later work

After retiring in 1979 she remained at Berkeley as a research economist emerita at the Institute of Industrial Relations. Her last book, Social Security Policies in Industrial Countries: A Comparative Analysis (1988), compiled information on pension, health, unemployment, manpower, child allowance, family and public assistance programmes in 28 countries, covering their scope, the adequacy of benefits and their financing; Jacobsen calls it "a particularly masterful compilation".

Civic and political activity

The Gordons campaigned for racial justice, and in 1953 she was one of the organizers of the Berkeley chapter of the NAACP. She was active in the League of Women Voters and was co-chair of the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee from 1948 to 1950. She was an appointed member of Berkeley's personnel board from 1961 to 1965 and an elected member of the Berkeley City Council from 1965 to 1969, and later wrote an essay on the city's politics in that period, "From Liberal Control to Radical Challenge" (1978). She was president of the Berkeley Co-op, a consumer cooperative, from 1982 to 1985, and served on the board of Stiles Hall, the university's community service centre. In 1987 she received the Benjamin Ide Wheeler Medal, awarded to "Berkeley's most useful citizen"; at the award luncheon Clark Kerr, paraphrasing the Iliad, described her as one of those rare people "to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds".

Personal life and death

She and Robert Aaron Gordon had two sons, Robert (born 1940) and David (born 1944), who both received Harvard degrees and became economists: Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University and David M. Gordon of the New School for Social Research. Her husband died in 1978, after 42 years of marriage. She died of cancer at her home in Berkeley on May 28, 1994, at the age of 83.

Selected works

  • "Japan's Balance of International Payments, 1903–31". In Elizabeth B. Schumpeter (ed.), The Industrialization of Japan and Manchukuo. New York: Macmillan, 1940, pp. 865–925.
  • Barriers to World Trade: A Study of Recent Commercial Policy. New York: Macmillan, 1941.
  • "International Aspects of American Agricultural Policy". American Economic Review 36 (4), part 1, September 1946: 596–612.
  • Employment Expansion and Population Growth: The California Experience, 1900–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.
  • The Economics of Welfare Policies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.
  • (ed., with Earl F. Cheit) Occupational Disability and Public Policy. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963.
  • Retraining and Labor Market Adjustment in Western Europe. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965.
  • (ed.) Poverty in America. San Francisco: Chandler, 1965.
  • (ed., with R. A. Gordon) Prosperity and Unemployment. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966.
  • (ed.) Higher Education and the Labor Market. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
  • Youth Education and Unemployment Problems: An International Perspective. Berkeley: Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, 1979.
  • Social Security Policies in Industrial Countries: A Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.