John Bates Clark
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| John Bates Clark | |
| Born | January 26, 1847 Providence, Rhode Island |
|---|---|
| Died | March 21, 1938 (aged 91) New York City |
| Nationality |  American |
| Fields | Economist |
| Institutions | Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University |
| Alma mater | Amherst College |
John Bates Clark (26 January 1847 – 21 March 1938) was an American neo-classical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics, and spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University.
Clark was born and raised in Providence, R. I. and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts at the age of 25. From 1872 to 1875 he attended the University of Zurich and the University of Heidelberg where he studied under Karl Knies (a leader of the German Historical School). Early in his career Clark's writings reflected his German Socialist background and showed him as a critic of capitalism. Upon his return to the United States, Clark taught economics, history and a whole series of other subjects at Carleton (where he taught Thorstein Veblen), Smith and Amherst colleges before coming into contact with graduate students at Johns Hopkins. In 1895, Clark finally won a position at Columbia University.
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[edit] Theoretical Work
After his return from 1877 onward Clark published several articles most of them edited later in The Philosophy of Wealth (1886). There he formulated an original version of marginal utility theory, principle already published by Jevons (1871), Menger (1871), and Walras (1878).
Until 1886 Clark is a Christian socialist reflecting the view of his German teachers that competition is no universal remedy – especially not for fixing wages. Clark writes: It is a dangerous mistake to extol competition, as such too highly, and regard all attacks upon it as revolutionary. … We do not eat men … but we do it by such indirect and refined methods that it does not generally occur to us that we are cannibals[1]. He hopes combating communism by suppression and reform:[2] Among the adherents of Communism there is a large element that is simply murderous, and this deserves only the murderer’s fate. ... It is possible that an indefinitely large proportion of declared communists in this country may be of worthless or criminal character. According to Clark only if the union of capital necessitates the union of labour just wages will come about and may be fixed by arbitration.[3]
This view on fair wages changed in 1886: Clark himself, it will be remembered has song down the doom of competition in The Philosophy of Wealth. But now … he has reversed his position and build[s] up a body of economic laws based on competition[4] writes Homan (1928) and Everett (1946) finds: Soon after writing the Philosophy of Wealth, however, Clark started to make defences for the competitive system. What caused the change is unknown. This much we can say. By the time he wrote The Distribution of Wealth he was convinced that pure competition was the natural and normal law by which the economic order obtained justice.[5] One cause that prompted this reorientation could be the Haymarket Riot 1886 in Chicago when some strikers were shot and others hanged – event still remembered the 1st of May worldwide outside the US. In the US it resulted in a cleansing of higher education from socialist reformers and the ruin of the Knights of Labor.
The foundation of Clark’s further work was competition: If nothing suppresses competition, progress will continue forever.[6] Clark: The science adapted … is economic Darwinism. … Though the process was savage, the outlook which it afforded was not wholly evil. The survival of crude strength was, in the long run, desirable.[7] This was the fundament to develop the theory which made him famous: Given competition and homogeneous factors of production labor and capital, the repartition of the social product will be according to the productivity of the last physical input of units of labor and capital. This theorem is a cornerstone of neoclassical micro-economics. Clark stated it in 1881[8] and more elaborated 1899 in The Distribution of Wealth.[9] The same theorem was formulated later independently by John Atkinson Hobson (1891) and Philip Wicksteed (1894). The political message of this theorem is: [W]hat a social class gets is, under natural law, what it contributes to the general output of industry.[10]
Clark’s conclusion rests upon the productive contribution of the last unit of physical labour – one hour unqualified labour – and the last unit of physical capital. To him heterogeneous capital goods have a second, a social form as homogeneous capital[11] (called jelly as a street can be moulded into an engine) and the productivity of the last unit of jelly determines profit. This retakes Karl Marx’s view that commodities have a heterogeneous natural form (Naturalform) and also opposed to it a homogenous value-form (Wertform)[12], jelly. Clark might have known this Marxian construction from his German time and was reproached for this similarity.[13]
Clark’s capital are not produced means of production each with a different production structure. It is an abstract, always existing and never perishing one great tool in the hand of working humanity[14] similar to a field or a waterfall, also considered capital by Clark.
The arguable sides of Clark’s notion of capital helped to give rise to the Cambridge capital controversy from 1954 to 1965 between the departments of economics at Cambridge University, England, and at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The John Bates Clark Medal, one of the most prestigious US-awards in the field of economics, was awarded in 1947 to Paul A. Samuelson whose textbook Economics divulged Clark’s capital concept worldwide.
J. B. Clark was the father of John Maurice Clark, who did not follow his father's ideological footsteps — instead, he became a leading Institutionalist.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Clark, J. B., 1878, How to Deal with Communism, pp. 533-542 in: New Englander, XXXVII, p. 537-8, 540.
- ^ Clark, J. B., 1878, p. 534.
- ^ Clark, J. B., 1887, Christianity and Modern Economics, pp. 50-59 in: New Englander, XLVII, p. 56.
- ^ Homan, P. T., 1928, John B. Clark, pp. 15-103 in: ibidem, Contemporary Economic Thought, N.Y. Harpers, p. 91.
- ^ Everett, J. R., 1946, Religion in Economics, N.Y.: King's Crown Press, p. 73.
- ^ Clark, J. B., 1907, Essentials of Economic Theory, reprint 2000, p. 374.
- ^ Clark, J. B., 1888, The Limits of Competition, pp. 2- 17 in: Clark, J. B./Giddings, F. H., The Modern Distributive Process, Boston: Ginn & Co, p. 2.
- ^ Clark, J. B., 1881, Distribution as determinded by the law of rent, pp. 229-318 in: Quarterly Journal of Economics, April.
- ^ Clark, J. B., 1908, The Distribution of Wealth, N.Y.: Macmillan; first printed 1899.
- ^ Clark, J. B., 1881, p. 312.
- ^ Clark 1908, pp. 59-60.
- ^ Appendix The Value-Form (Die Wertform) to the 1st German edition of Capital, Volume 1, 1867; in the second edition this was worked into chap. 1
- ^ Fetter, Frank A., 1900, Recent Discussions of the Capital Concept, Quarterly Journal of Economics 1900.
- ^ Clark, 1908, pp. 59-60.
[edit] See also
[edit] Major works
- The Philosophy of Wealth (1886)
- The Distribution of Wealth (1899, 1902)
- Essentials of Economic Theory (1907)
- Social Justice without Socialism (1914).
[edit] External links
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