Published by EH.Net (April 2022).
Alex Millmow. *The Gypsy Economist: The Life and Times of Colin Clark.
*Singapore:
Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2021. xx + 396 pp. $119.99 (hardback), ISBN:
978-981-33-6945-0.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Adrian Darnell, Retired Professor of Economics,
Durham University.
Colin Grant Clark was born in 1905; he was educated at Winchester College
and Brasenose College, Oxford, from where he graduated in Chemistry in
1928. His interest in statistics and economics was born of studying
statistics in his curriculum and having attended some of Lionel Robbins’
lectures extra curricula. Clark’s interest in economics was furthered at
the Oxford Labour Club and then within the University Adam Smith Society,
to which Clark’s greatest contributions were to illuminate theoretical
discussions with voluminous statistics designed to bring the conversations
‘down to earth.’ Robbins introduced Clark to Hugh Dalton and later William
Beveridge, for whom he worked as a research assistant at the London School
of Economics in 1928–29; he then worked with Allyn Young and in 1929 left
London for Liverpool, where he worked for Alexander Carr-Saunders. During
this time he ran unsuccessful parliamentary campaigns as a Labour candidate
in North Dorset (1929), and later at Liverpool Wavertree (1931) and South
Norfolk (1935).
In 1930 he was (to his surprise, apparently) appointed as research
assistant to the newly convened National Economic Advisory Council (NEAC).
However, when Clark was invited by Ramsey MacDonald (an avowed
protectionist) to write a case for protectionism Clark (who favoured
devaluation and expansion of the domestic economy) chose to resign in 1931
rather than compromise his principles. Keynes, a member of the NEAC, having
been impressed by Clark’s command of data, then secured him a lectureship
in statistics at Cambridge.
In 1937 Clark accepted a position with the Queensland government and stayed
in Australia in various government roles, all of which afforded him the
opportunity to pursue his own research. In 1951 he took secondment to the
Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, and then to Chicago (1952),
before taking the Directorship of the Agricultural Economics Research
Institute at Oxford (1952–69). He returned to Australia in 1969 as the
Director of the Institute of Economic Progress at Monash (1969–78) and
finally he was a Research Consultant to the Department of Economics at the
University of Queensland until his death in Brisbane in 1989. Today Clark
is, perhaps, best known for his work on national income and development
economics.
This biography is a most illuminating account of Clark and his work, the
man and his times, and provides a comprehensive assessment of his many
economic contributions. The picture painted is of a most stimulating and
heterodox thinker, a man who had no formal training in economics or
economic methodology, and a man who revelled in being annoying!
Clark was a prolific writer of books and academic and newspaper articles
and a broadcaster whose work appears to have attracted both praise and
criticism, not always in equal measure. The source of much criticism had
two sources: his lack of training in the subject and a suspect methodology
were often evident; and his later work, especially after his conversion to
Roman Catholicism in 1940, seemed to some to rely (often implicitly) upon
Catholic thought, as distinct from economic thought and evidence.
Clark’s methodological approach was clearly influenced by his chemistry
studies, and his ‘scientific’ economics stressed ‘the careful systemisation
of all observable facts, the framing of hypotheses from these facts,
predictions of fresh conclusions on the basis of these hypotheses, and the
testing of these conclusions against further observable facts’ (1940, p.
vii). He expressly prioritised observation over theory: he praised
Australian economists for their ‘respect for observed facts in preference
to long chains of theoretical reasoning’ (1940, p. ix), but his lack of a
theoretical framework and an overreliance on (not always robust) data was
criticised. Clark believed ‘many of the laws of economics could be deduced
from comparative observations rather than from an *a priori* position’ (p.
43), did not recognise that observations are always seen through a
particular window of theory, and expressly relegated economic theory. His
approach relied heavily on the quality of statistics, and his early work on
national income sought, successfully, to provide good data. *The National
Income 1924-31* was a major work, developing the earlier work of Bowley and
Stamp (1927); he brought quantitative flesh to Keynesian concepts and, for
the first time, distinguished between national income and national product.
This work was well received but, like almost all his work it seems, it
attracted criticism in at least equal measure. There is a recurring theme
to the reception he generated: he was regularly criticised for sloppiness,
poor methodology, and allowing unstated principles (notably Catholic
principles) to influence his analysis. One example must suffice. Clark’s
(1967) *Population Growth and Land Use *was described as ‘a source of
pleasure, information and challenge’ (Spengler, 1968, p. 228, in Millmow p.
279) but the book’s controversy stemmed from the level of scholarship on
the one hand and his views on birth control on the other. Davis (1968, p.
133) observed that ‘the tools of scholarship are casually handled with
frequent omission of authors, dates or titles, occasional misspellings,
ambiguous labelling of charts and tables, use of derived figures and
unexplained inconsistencies, disregard of contrary arguments and evidence’
and concluded that ‘Clark’s reputation and his skill with words and numbers
give his argument a halo of credibility that may mislead the untrained eye’
(in Millmow, p. 284). Davis further suggested that Clark had ‘massaged his
data to fit his thesis.’
Clark was nominated several times for the Nobel prize yet was never
successful (p. 7). Millmow, I think, has more than adequately answered the
question ‘why not?’. Clark’s work lacked a firm theoretical foundation and
he ‘took delight in entertaining perverse views’ (p. 4). He was never
appointed a full professor of economics and chose not to pursue his
pioneering early work on National Income Accounting, moving on to write in
less prosaic areas of economics. That Clark was well known for holding and
promulgating unorthodox views may also have been a factor, especially as
Millmow’s biography leads the reader to conclude that he deliberately
sought to annoy.
Two examples may suffice. First, in 1962, speaking to the theme of the
problems of growth in the Australian economy he drew upon his ideas of the
last 20 years and asserted that it took ‘Australia a long time to learn’,
that Australia had foolishly ‘set out to manufacture everything’, ascribed
Australia’s ‘mediocre growth’ to protectionism, low levels of education,
low growth of the labour force, developing industry at the expense of
agriculture, and especially an ‘aversion to competition’ and a dependency
on ‘government to put things right’ (pp. 309-10). One discussant (Crawford,
1962, p. 30) observed ‘we have been given a *typical* Colin Clark
production . . . *bristling with comment calculated to irritate*, very
*revealing
of his own prejudices* on many subjects, it is nonetheless full of shrewd
insights and worthwhile provocations’ [my emphasis]. Not only were his
comments *designed to* *irritate*, but this was *typical*.
As a second example, Clark spoke in a debate on abortion law reform in
Sydney in 1972. On the other side of the debate was Germaine Greer. Clark
remarked to Greer, “I don’t know what to call you: Miss Greer or Mrs?” to
which she replied, “Call me Doctor” (cited in Wyndham, 2012, p. 359).
Here we have a splendid biography. Clark, the idiosyncratic polymath shines
from every page, but the title is troubling. While Arnold’s *The Scholar
Gypsy* may well have been Clark’s favourite poem (p. 11), since that poem’s
subject is an Oxford scholar who gives up his academic life to join a band
of Gypsies, absorbing their customs and seeking the source of their wisdom,
the picture of Colin Clark painted by Millmow doesn’t quite fit. Clark
never gave up academe and nor does he seem to have sought to absorb others’
customs nor seek their sources of wisdom: on the contrary, he comes across
as more interested in having others absorb his ways of thinking and
understand his wisdom.
References
Bowley, Arthur L., and Josiah Stamp. *The National Income 1924*. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1927.
Clark, Colin G. *The National Income 1924-31*. London: Macmillan, 1932.
Clark, Colin G. *The Conditions of Economic Progress*. London: Macmillan,
1940.
Clark, Colin G. *Population Growth and Land Use*. London: Macmillan, 1967.
Crawford, John Grenfell. ‘Discussion.’ In John Wilkes (ed.), *Economic
Growth in **Australia*. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962.
Davis, Kingsley. ‘Colin Clark and the benefits of an increase in
population.’ *Scientific American* 218(4): 133-138 (1968).
Spengler, Joseph, J. ‘Review of *Population Growth and Land Use* by C.
Clark.’ *Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science* 380:
228 (1968).
Wyndham, Diana. *Norman Haire and the Study of Sex*. Sydney: Sydney
University Press, 2012.
Adrian Darnell is Retired Professor of Economics at Durham University. He
has published extensively on econometrics and its history.
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