John Bates Clark

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John Bates Clark (* 26. January 1847 in Providence , † 21st March 1938 in New York City , New York ) was an American economist of neoclassicism . He is considered one of the leading authors of the Anglo-American marginal utility school (also Cambridge School ) as well as the developer of the marginal productivity theory and to that extent one of the authors of the " marginalist revolution ".

Life

Clark grew up in Providence and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts at the age of 25. Between 1872 and 1875 he studied at the University of Zurich and Heidelberg University , where he was taught by Karl Knies , a leading representative of the historical school .

Upon returning to the United States, Clark taught economics, history and other subjects at Carleton College , Smith College and Amherst College; he later taught graduate students at Johns Hopkins University .

From 1894 to 1895, Clark served as the third president of the American Economic Association . He then received a chair at Columbia University , which became the focus of his work.

In 1916 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Act

After his return, JB Clark published essays from 1877, which still reflect the critical distance of his German teachers from economic competition as a panacea - especially the competition between workers. Clark (1878) writes: It is a dangerous mistake to praise competition too much and to regard all attacks on it as revolutionary. ... We don't eat people ... but we do it through such indirect and refined processes that we generally don't notice that we are cannibals . At this time, Clark is a Christian socialist whose enemies are the communists, who are to be fought through repression and reform: among the supporters of communism there are very many who are simply murderous, and they only deserve the fate of a murderer. ... It is possible that an indefinite number of the declared communists in this country are of a worthless and criminal character . According to Clark, there are only fair wages if the trusts that are created on the employee side are matched by appropriate unions and the agreements are negotiated with the help of mediators.

Clark summarized these essays in The Philosophy of Wealth (1886). The most important part of it is his elaboration of the concept of marginal utility , which, however, had already been developed by William Stanley Jevons (1871), Carl Menger (1871) and Léon Walras (1878).

In 1886 Clark's theoretical position turned: soon after the Philosophy of Wealth, however, Clark began to defend the competitive system. What caused this change is unknown (Everett 1946) and Homan (1928) writes: Clark himself, as will be remembered, wrote a swan song for competition in the Philosophy of Wealth. Now that he's changed direction, he's building a theoretical framework based on the competition . The reason for the change was probably the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, in which strikers were shot and strike leaders hanged. As a result, schools and universities in the US were purged of “ socialist ” reformers and the previously powerful Knights of Labor union shrank.

Competition is the basis for Clark's future work: The appropriate science ... was economic Darwinism. … Although the process was gruesome, the prospect it opened up wasn't bad on the whole. Survival of gross strength was, in the long run, desirable. This was the basis of the thesis that made him famous: With complete competition and homogeneous production factors labor and capital , the total product is distributed among these factors as wages and profit according to the productive contribution of the last units of these production factors . This thesis, today the basis of neoclassical microeconomics, was formulated by Clark (1891) and worked out in 1899 as the book The Distribution of Wealth . It was later formulated again independently of John Atkinson Hobson (1891) and Philip Henry Wicksteed (1894). The political message of the thesis was: what a social class maintains is - under natural law - what it contributes to the general production of industry .

Clark's thesis is based on the productive contribution of a material unit of labor - one hour of unskilled labor - and a material unit of capital. He argued that the heterogeneous capital goods of a production are at the same time homogeneous capital ( called jelly because, for example, a road can be turned into a machine) and that the productivity of the last unit of this homogeneous capital determines profit. Marx made a similar distinction between the heterogeneous use of goods and the homogeneous social form ( jelly ). Clark will have known this from his time in Germany; he was accused of resemblance.

Clark's capital are not produced means of production with different production lengths, but an abstract, always existing and never fading large tool in the hands of working mankind , similar to the productivity of a field or a waterfall, which for Clark also represent capital .

The weaknesses of the neoclassical concept of capital founded by Clark led to the debate on capital theory between Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, USA in 1954–1965.

The American Economic Association - of which he was president in 1894 and 1895 - awards the John Bates Clark Medal , one of the most important awards in the field of economics , in his memory . The first to receive it in 1947 was Paul A. Samuelson .

John Bates Clark is the father of the economist John Maurice Clark , who became known as the author of the antidote thesis .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Past and Present Officers. aeaweb.org ( American Economic Association ), accessed March 24, 2018 .
  2. ^ Clark, JB, 1878, How to Deal with Communism , New Englander, XXXVII, pp. 533-542.
  3. ↑ Clark 1878, p. 534.
  4. ^ Everett, JR, 1946, Religion in Economics , NY: King's Crown Press, p. 73.
  5. ↑ Homan, PT, 1928, John B. Clark , pp. 15-103 in: the same, Contemporary Economic Thought , NY Harpers, p. 91.
  6. ^ Clark, JB, 1888, The Limits of Competition , pp. 2- 17 in: Clark, JB / Giddings, FH, The modern distributive process , Boston: Ginn & Co, p. 2.
  7. ^ Clark, JB, 1891, Distribution as determined by a law of rent , pp. 289-318 in: Quarterly Journal of Economics, April.
  8. ^ Clark, JB, 1908, The Distribution of Wealth , NY: Macmillan; First edition 1899.
  9. ^ Clark, JB, 1891, p. 312.
  10. ↑ Clark 1908, pp. 59-60.
  11. ↑ Appendix The value form of the first edition of Das Kapital Volume 1, 1867; in later editions in chap. 1 incorporated
  12. ^ Fetter, Frank A., 1900, Recent Discussions of the Capital Concept , Quarterly Journal of Economics 1900.
  13. ^ Clark, 1908, pp. 59-60.

Major works

  • The Philosophy of Wealth . Boston: Ginn 1886
  • The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits . New York: Macmillan 1899
  • Essentials of Economic Theory (1907)
  • Social Justice without Socialism (1914)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Clark, John Bates
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Clark, John B.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist
DATE OF BIRTH January 26, 1847
PLACE OF BIRTH Providence , Rhode Island
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 1938
Place of death New York City , New York