John Bates Clark

Background

John Clark was born into a farmer's family on January 26, 1847 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States.

Education

Clark graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts (1872), then studied in Europe at Heidelberg (under K. Knies) and Zurich universities.

Career

Clark participated actively in the creation of a "new" economics, becoming the third president of the young reformers' American Economic Association. He was professor of history and political economy at Carleton College until 1882. He then taught at Smith College, Amherst, and Johns Hopkins University. From 1895 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1923, Clark was part of the influential faculty of political science at Columbia University, where he edited the Political Science Quarterly (1895-1911). During that time, his views gradually shifted from a critic to a supporter of capitalism and he later became known as a leading advocate of the capitalist system. In 1911-1923 he was a Director of the Department of Economics and History of the Carnegie Endowment.

Achievements

• 

  John Bates Clark developed a distinctive form of marginal utility – marginal productivity theory, which he presented not as a completed system, but as a first approximation and an approach to further analysis. The indisputable influence which he exercised upon at least a generation of economists lay more in his development of analytical tools than in the conclusions he drew from them. Through his marginal utility principle, developed independently of Léon Walras, Carl Menger, and W. S. Jevons, Clark became the leading theorist of a marginal productivity theory of distribution which idealized the relationship between income and an individual's contribution to goods or services.
  
  In his main work "The Distribution of Wealth" (1899, Russian translation, 1934), he justified the theory of marginal productivity, explaining the pricing of factors of production and the distribution of relative shares of the social product from the standpoint of marginalism. Clark formulated universal laws and distinguished between statics and dynamics in economics; interpreted wages, interest on money capital and rent (from land and other "capital goods") as income of factors of production in statics, and profit - as income for a justified risk of an entrepreneur in dynamics. In the books "The Problem of Monopoly" (1904) and "Essentials of Economic Theory" (1907), Clark laid out his recommendations for antitrust legislation and initiated the interpretation of unions as labor market monopolies.
  
  The Clark Medal was created as he was the first American economist of world significance, awarded every 2 years to the most prominent US economist under 40 years of age (among the recipients - P. Samuelson, K. Boulding, M. Friedman, J. Tobin, C. J. Arrow, L. Klein, R. Solow, J. Stiglitz).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits (Cosimo Classics Economics)

    (What would be the rate of wages, if labor and capital wer...)

    1899
  • The philosophy of wealth: Economic principles newly formulated 1886
  • Capital And Its Earning 1888
  • The Modern Distributive Process. Studies of Competition and its Limits 1888
  • The Control of Trusts: An Argument in Favor of Curbing the Power of Monopoly by a Natural Method 1901
  • The Problem of Monopoly: A Study of a Grave Danger and of the Natural Mode of Averting It 1904
  • Essentials of Economic Theory: As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy 1907
  • Social Justice Without Socialism 1914
  • The Unit of Wealth... (German Edition)

Connections

Wife:

Myra Smith

Son:

John Maurice Clark

References

• Great Russian Encyclopedia