Biography: John Bates Clark

Biography: John Bates Clark


... 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). After 1911 he devoted himself to pacifist causes and served as the first director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Near the turn of the century, rapid industrial development and serious discontent, especially with the anomalous distribution of wealth, prompted Clark to examine problems of production and distribution. 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.

Clark's first important work, The Philosophy of Wealth (1885), attacking the hedonistic and atomistic assumptions of classical economics, attempted to tie economics to social ethics. Clark's major contribution, The Distribution of Wealth (1899), discarded his early reformist tendencies to present a deductive system of economic harmony based upon the competition of rational, self-interested men inevitably progressing. Clark began by assuming that society was a biological organism subject to collective moral judgment. Then he divided economics into "static" and "dynamic" analysis, a distinction which continues to characterize American economics. ...

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