John Maurice Clark

John Maurice Clark (30 November 1884 – 27 June 1963) was an American economist whose work combined the rigor of traditional economic analysis with an "institutionalist" attitude.

Early career

Clark was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. He studied at Amherst College, graduating in 1905, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1910. He was an Instructor at Colorado College (1908–1910) and at Amherst College (1910–1915). In 1915 he joined the faculty of political economy at the University of Chicago. He accept a professorship at Columbia in 1926, where he remained until he retired in 1957.

Contributions

Throughout his career Clark was concerned with the dynamics of a market economy, or Competition as a Dynamic Process, the title of his last work. In Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs, Clark developed his theory of the acceleration principle, that investment demand can fluctuate widely when consumer demand fluctuates; in this he anticipated key Keynesian theories of investment and business cycles. This work is also considered a major conceptual contribution in the field of cost accounting. Clark is considered one of the founders of the theory of workable competition, neither pure competition nor pure monopoly, a neglected Marshallian insight.

With his theory of X-efficiency, Harvey Leibenstein demonstrated that the measurability of the market price of products in a monopoly is very difficult to obtain.

John Maurice Clark was the son of John Bates Clark, and shared his view of the importance of ethical and policy issues. Both father and son worked jointly on the revision of John Bates Clark's The Control of Trusts (1914), work continued by John Maurice in Social Control of Business (1926, revised in 1939).

Clark was President of the American Economic Association in 1935, and was awarded the Francis A. Walker Medal in 1952 (the highest honor of the AEA).

Clark died, aged 78, in West Haven, Connecticut.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maurice_Clark

He was a Professor Emeritus of Economics at Columbia University and was born in Northampton, Mass on November 30. 1884. He married Winifred Fiske Miller on June 17, 1921. He taught at Colorado College, Amherst College and the University of Chicago before he joined the Columbia faculty in 1926 until his retirement in 1947. His father, John Bates Clark was also a professor of economics at Columbia. Dr. Clark authored many books including "Guidepost of Change", "Alternatives to Serfdom" and "Economic Institutes and Human Welfare". He was survived by his wife, Winifred; two sons, John Bates Clark, 2nd ; and Frank Justus Clark, along with a sister, Mrs. H. Carrington Lancaster and five grandchildren. (submitted by "SLS" via e-mail)

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Jan 8 2018, 12:59:12 UTC