Gordon is a rigorous US employment-and-inflation explorer that pairs a clean, reproducible data layer with a heterodox real-competition (Shaikh) reading of what the numbers mean. It is part of Heterodata, an Arcanum Research project.
Named for Robert J. Gordon, David M. Gordon, and Margaret S. Gordon — three economists who worked, in different ways, on the measurement of inflation and employment. Robert J. Gordon (b. 1940) spent a career on what a price index actually captures: The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices (1990) showed how much of recorded inflation is unadjusted quality change, and he served on the 1996 Boskin Commission that put CPI bias on the national agenda. David M. Gordon (1944–1996), a New School economist, argued that the labor market is not one market but several segments, so the same work is paid differently depending on where in the structure it sits — the social structures of accumulation. Margaret S. Gordon (1910–2004), David's mother, was a labor economist who worked on what employment statistics are for: employment policy, unemployment insurance, and social insurance more broadly. Between them they mark the two questions this site keeps asking of the official series — what does the price number really measure, and what is the employment number being asked to do.
The naming cites their published work; it is not a claim that this site reproduces or extends it.
The official labor-and-inflation series — CPI and PCE, the labor-force and payroll surveys, JOLTS flows, productivity and unit labor costs — built entirely from BLS, BEA, and Federal-Reserve primary data, across {{ n_charts }} chart-series. Every figure is traceable to a public source and downloadable as CSV, XLSX, or Parquet.
Where the mainstream reads recent inflation through NAIRU, the Phillips curve, and a markup "greedflation" story, Gordon offers a classical, real-competition alternative: distributive conflict between labor and capital, unit labor costs against productivity, the economy-wide profit rate as the regulating variable, and the productive/unproductive split of labor as the structural backdrop. The interpretation is always labeled; the data layer is neutral and stands on its own.
Gordon is deliberately US-centric and on-thesis. It carries inflation, the labor market, the heterodox lens, and structural labor change. It does not carry off-thesis material — international comparisons, sub-national geography, banking/finance, or a data-policy/political angle — even though the underlying research catalog contains those series. Those are candidate sibling sites, not this one.
Gordon links to its hub at heterodata.org and to the architect at nickanderson.us. Use the switcher in the header to move between the Heterodata sites.