Introduction
It may surprise some that the Anglo-Australian economist, Colin Clark, could be regarded as an Oxford economist. He is barely mentioned, for instance, in Warren Young and Fred Lee's anthology Oxford Economics and Oxford Economists (1993).
However, his university education, including an exposure to statistics and economics, was forged at Oxford as well as an introduction to socialism and Labour politics. In mid-career, Clark was appointed as Director of Oxford's Agricultural Economics Research Institute (AERI), a post he held from 1953 to 1969. That position allowed him to become a Fellow of his old college, Brasenose. Appropriately, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, Brasenose hosted a colloquium in 1905 celebrating Clark's life and contributions. In his presentation, David Hendry hailed Clark as an ‘Oxford-trained economist whose Herculean data collection remain unparalleled to the modern day'.1It will come as less of a surprise to many that Clark was a world figure in the economics discipline over two distinct periods, first in the 1930s for his
1Colloquium held to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Clark's birth, Brasenose College, Oxford, 2 November 2005 (mimeo).
A. Millmow (*)
Federation Business School, Mt Helen, VIC, Australia e-mail: a.millmow@federation.edu.au
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R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_16
work on national income accounting. The Australian economist, Duncan Ironmonger, rightly hailed Clark as ‘the father of the national accounts' because he was the first to measure national product, growth and distribution.[103] That milestone was quickly followed by another major undertaking looking at international comparisons of national income and finding that most of the world was desperately poor and that “the age of plenty” would be a long time in coming.
These pioneering efforts led one newspaper to deem Clark ‘a kind of one-man central statistical office for the world' (The Daily Telegraph 1989: 21).During his time at the Institute, Clark walked again into the international spotlight for his work on development economics, particularly his controversial thesis that rapid population growth was a positive factor for economic prosperity. Being in the limelight was part of Clark's nature as an economist, either in writing for the popular press or, indeed, making headlines himself. His work had already made, for instance, the front page of The New York Times in 1949 disproving claims that the Soviet Union was outpacing the West in terms of economic performance. In fact, American productivity was eight-and-a-half times greater than the Soviet rate (Clark 1949a). He again figured prominently in the American press when he warned that the US economy was in danger of falling headlong into recession in 1954. Clark (1949b) had an econometric model of the American business cycle to fortify his projections. His facility with statistics and their interpretation led to him becoming one of the founding fathers of econometrics, yet he is barely mentioned in anthologies on the history of economic thought.
While Clark spent 16 years as the Director of the AERI, he was strangely detached from the Department of Economics at Oxford. Indeed, he found it to be ‘intellectually stultifying'.[104] At the time, Oxford economics was dominated by a left-wing Keynesian clique that encompassed demand management, redistribution ofincome and wealth, nationalisation, and microeconomic intervention (see Young and Lee 1993: 204). Few Oxford economists had interest in the ‘data-grubbing' efforts of Clark.[105] However, Clark rubbed shoulders with the likes of Roy Harrod, I.M.D. Little and J.R. Hicks; he sparred intellectually with Thomas Balogh over British economic policy and with Peter Wiles over Soviet economics.
Incidentally, it was Hicks who was instrumental in alerting the relevant Oxford authorities to Clark's availability to head up the AERI. When that appointment was announced it was likened by the Cambridge agricultural economist, Ruth Cohen, to ‘dropping a land mine on a quiet back street' (Cohen quoted in Healey and McFarlane 1979: 20). It was not just because Clark was not renowned as an agricultural economist, but because he had a reputation as a rational antagonist, someone who loved to be outspoken. That said, even he agreed that it was an odd appointment since his research speciality was, in fact, long-run economic change (see Peters 2001: 9-10). However, Clark was underselling himself. At Cambridge, he had written a few pieces on British agricultural policy but, more importantly, in 1935 he had presented a paper at the British Association for the Advancement of Science where he argued that the world's food supply had caught up and overtaken the world's population to the extent that relative food prices were now falling. The paper had opened with the line ‘Was Malthus wrong?' and went on to demonstrate Clark's early suspicion about the validity of Malthusianism but also portended a future research interest about the true extent of world hunger.2