[3] 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.