Beginnings
Born in London in 1905, Colin was the first of four children of James and Marion Clark. His father had been a Scottish-born merchant adventurer who had spent 20 years abroad, mostly in Australia, and was involved in the meat export trade.
James Clark made and lost three fortunes in his lifetime; here was an early exposure for Colin of the capriciousness of the business cycle. He would later say that you could not understand economics unless you understood the nature of business. Inordinately bright, Colin won a scholarship to Winchester and went up to Oxford to study chemistry. He gained Second Class Honours which suggested that his mind was focused elsewhere. Clark had, in fact, began auditing economics lectures and reading economic tracts. According to Lionel Robbins, a young economics tutor at New College, Clark had quickly become ‘disillusioned' with chemistry. He recalled how Clark would turn up to the Adam Smith Society ‘with large sheaves of statistical material, worked up in his spare time, to illuminate and bring down to earth the theoretical discussions of his fellow members' (Robbins 1971: 119).Clark's interest in economics had been sparked by his strong political beliefs and early embrace of Fabian socialism and the Labour Party. It was G.D.H. Cole who introduced him to the world of guild socialism. Clark featured in debates at the Oxford Union during 1927 and 1928 and was described by one colleague, John Parker (1982: 16), as ‘one of the most original and striking Labour Club personalities’. He used his facility at handling statistical data to buttress his arguments. Auspiciously, his first publication, “A Graphical Analysis of the Unemployment Position, 1920—1928” (Clark 1929), merited the Royal Statistical Society’s Frances Wood Memorial Prize in 1928. He later described it as a rather ‘laborious compilation’ of monthly movements in unemployment statistics (Clark to Arndt, 4 September 1978, Heinz Arndt Papers, National Library of Australia).
For the moment, a political career beckoned; Clark ran as a Labour Party candidate in three general elections. All met with failure with Clark realising that he did not have ‘the right personality’ for politics. He realised that he was at heart ‘a scientist. Whereas politicians have to deal with action. It is a fundamental distinction’ (Clark in Higgins 1989: 297). Clark would become instead a backroom boy, working on Labour policy and those bodies associated with the party.After Robbins, another academic mentor was Allyn Young of Harvard who had a visiting post at the London School of Economics (LSE). For a few months, Clark worked as his research assistant. He combined this with helping William Beveridge, Director of LSE undertake a “Survey of London Life and Labour”, focusing on the urban poor. Under Young, Clark was tasked with finding empirical proof of this hypothesis using American manufacturing statistics. However, his research came up empty-handed (Clark to Blitch, 7 December 1972, Colin Clark Papers, Fryer Library, University ofQueensland (CCP, FL, UQ hereafter)). In his Inaugural Lecture at LSE, Young had spoken of how, ‘Economic theory, divorced from its functional relations to economic problems, or with those relations obscured, is no better than an interesting intellectual game... But it cannot advance knowledge, for it leads up a blind alley’ (Young 1928: 4-5) and of how economics would have to ‘make room for new conceptions and new sorts of abstractions if it is to make effective use of the new facts which the statisticians are uncovering’ (ibid.: 10).
Clark left LSE in 1929 to take up an appointment as a research assistant with the distinguished sociologist and demographer, Alexander Carr-Saunders, the Charles Booth Professor of Social Science at the University of Liverpool. This meant doing similar work to that which he had undertaken in London, in this case looking at living conditions of people in the slums of Liverpool. The fieldwork opened Clark’s eyes to urban squalor and set his mind upon improving urban life. It also exposed him to Carr-Saunders’ work on sociology and demographics. This social survey work on Merseyside would culminate much later in a research paper which found that urban population density fell by a negative exponential the greater the distance from the city centre (see Clark 1951a). The work on the urban poor also gave Clark an interest in national income, particularly the distribution between wages and other incomes.
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