ABSTRACT
Power and conflict over the distribution of income are both important features of economic life, and they are features that were of central interest to David Gordon. Incorporating the effects of power and income distribution into macroeconomics gives rise to two different projects. The first project concerns construction of substantive microeconomic foundations for these phenomena. The second project concerns the placement of power and income distribution within macro models, and identifying how they affect the macroeconomic process. A core proposition of post-Keynesian economics is the centrality of aggregate demand in the determination of the level of economic activity. The neo-Keynesian construction of the macro process posits that goods market conditions determine real wages and employment. That finance matters for the business cycle is evident in the credit-led US economic expansions of the 1980s and 1990s, and the significance of financial markets has been underscored by the economic crisis that afflicted Southeast Asia in 1997.
