Board of Economist Member Didn’t Refute Arguments About the Reagan ‘Boom’ Years

The attack by Board of Economists member David M. Gordon (“Reagan ‘Boom’ Just a Lot of Noise,” Feb. 25) on my recent essay in the New York Times is quite extraordinary. Professor Gordon never refuted my main point: The seven-year-plus economic expansion in the United States since November, 1982, is--using the normal criteria of GNP produced, jobs created, successive months of continuous growth and changes in the value of the stock market--the greatest economic expansion we have ever had.

Any beginning graduate student of economics can tell you that the way to compare economic expansions or contractions is to apply the same multiple criteria to each. Gordon, in an orgy of selective misrepresentation, compares jobs and GNP from a number of wildly different time periods.

Gordon is a committed, self-acknowledged Marxist of almost 20 years standing and I can understand how he might be personally upset reading a piece by the former domestic and economic policy adviser to President Reagan describing factually how powerful the U.S. economy is.

By definition, one of America’s economic expansions has to be our greatest one; perhaps someday Professor Gordon will let us all know which one he thinks is the greatest.

MARTIN ANDERSON

Senior Fellow

Hoover Institution

David M. Gordon replies: I still question the standards Mr. Anderson used. In my April 22 column, I will show that the long expansion of the 1960s was uniformly more impressive than the long expansion of the 1980s.