Colin Clark

Colin Clark, one of the most fertile minds in twentieth-century applied economics, was born in London in 1905. After graduating in chemistry at Oxford University in 1924, he worked as assistant to William H. Beveridge, Allyn Young, and A.M. Carr-Saunders, stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate in the May 1929 general elections, then joined the staff of the Economic Advisory Council which had recently been formed by the Ramsay MacDonald government and which included among its members John Maynard Keynes, G.D.H. Cole, Josiah C. Stamp, and R.H. Tawney. Having declined an invitation by MacDonald to help him prepare a protectionist manifesto, he was glad to receive an appointment in 1931 as lecturer in statistics at Cambridge University (Clark, 1977). In 1937, he accepted an invitation to spend two terms as visiting lecturer at the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, but remained in Australia for fourteen years, from 1938 as director of the Bureau of Industry and economic adviser to the government of Queensland. When, in 1952, after increasing divergence of opinion — there remained no policies of the government with which he could agree — he resigned and spent a year, first as a freelance writer and business consultant, then as visiting professor at the University of Chicago.