Colin Grant Clark

Background

Colin Clark was born on November 2, 1905 in London, England.

Education

He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, then at Winchester College. He subsequently attended Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated in Chemistry in 1928. He also graduated from Oxford University.

Career

After graduation Clark worked as a research assistant with William Beveridge at the London School of Economics (1928–29) and then with Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders and Allyn Young at the University of Liverpool (1929–30). During this time he ran unsuccessful campaigns to be elected to parliament for the British Labour Party in the seat of North Dorset (1929), and later for Liverpool Wavertree (1931) and South Norfolk (1935). In 1930 he was appointed a research assistant to the Economic Advisory Council newly convened by Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald. He resigned shortly after his appointment, after being asked to write a background memorandum to make a case for protectionism. Despite this, he had sufficiently impressed one of the council members (John Maynard Keynes) to secure an appointment as a lecturer in statistics at Cambridge University. At Cambridge, he was a lecturer in Statistics from 1931 to 1938. In 1938-1953 he was in government service in the state of Queensland in Australia (Director of the Bureau of Industry, Financial Advisor to the Treasury), in 1953–69 director of the Institute for Agricultural Economics at Oxford University.

Achievements

• In 1984 he was named by the World Bank as one of the "pioneers of development" along with Sir Arthur Lewis, Gunnar Myrdal, W.W. Rostow and Jan Tinbergen. In 1987 Clark was together with Professor Trevor Swan the first recipient of the Distinguished Fellow awards, presented by The Economic Society of Australia.

Works

• book

  • Conditions of Economic Progress

    1940

  • The National Income

    1932

  • Poverty Before Politics

    1977

  • Australian Hopes and Fears

    1958

  • A Critique of Russian Statistics

    1939

  • Population Growth and Land Use

    1967

  • Regional and Urban Location

    1982

  • Growthmanship

    1961

  • The Economic Position of Great Britain

    1936

  • Economics of Subsistence Agriculture

    1964

• paper

  • The National Income and The Net Output of Industry

Connections

Clark married Margery Tattersall in 1935, and they had 8 sons and 1 daughter who in turned produced a total of 50 grandchildren. His son Gregory became an author and academic in Japan. His nephew is the cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton.

Father:

James Clark

the dealer of the Scottish origin who migrated to Queensland in 1878

Wife:

Marjorie Tattersall

References

• Great Russian Encyclopedia