Robert Aaron Gordon (born Aaron Goldstein; July 26, 1908 – April 7, 1978) was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

from 1938 to 1976. In 1975, he served as president of the

American Economic Association The American Economic Association (AEA) is a learned society in the field of economics. It publishes several peer-reviewed journals acknowledged in business and academia. There are some 23,000 members. History and Constitution The AEA was esta ...

. He was married to economist Margaret Gordon (1910–94). Both of their sons, Robert J. Gordon and David M. Gordon, became notable economists as well. In 1959, with funding from the

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death ...

, Gordon and James Edwin Howell published ''Higher Education for Business'', later known as the Gordon-Howell report. It is considered a key event in the history of business management and its development as a profession. The report gave detailed recommendations for treating management as a science and improving the academic quality of business schools. The next thirty years are sometimes referred to as a “Golden Age” in which quantitative social science research became an established part of business schools.

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* 1908 births 1978 deaths People from Washington, D.C. 20th-century American economists Johns Hopkins University alumni Harvard University alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Presidents of the American Economic Association Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association {{US-economist-stub