John Bates Clark

John Bates Clark (1847-1938) was an American economist. According to Schumpeter, he was one of the discoverers of the Neoclassical marginal approach and "architect of one of its most significant theoretical structures." As the text indicates, Clark took this approach further than some others in applying it to the business firm and the maximization of profits. One of the results was a theory of the distribution which will be sketched in the text. Clark believed that this theory was not only a correct theory of market incomes but demonstrated that market outcomes were just. Many economists who have accepted Clark's positive economics (that is, his description of "what is" the result of profit maximization) without endorsing his idea that these results are just. Clark's most important university position was at Columbia, 1895-1923. Clark's son, John Maurice Clark, was also an economist and, although they were co-authors of some of their work, John Maurice Clark's work is remembered as being quite different from -- and in some ways contradictory to -- his father's.

Here is a major work by John Bates Clark, with a picture of Clark.