Memorial minutes give us a snapshot appreciation of a deceased economist by colleagues. One really doesn’t read these to get any new significant items for the biography, one hopes instead to cull some insight into the minds and hearts of those who knew both the person and the work. “Innate modesty and a genuine kindliness” are a pair of expressed recessive traits that perhaps help to distinguish John Bates Clark from brilliant economic theorists of more recent vintage.
This biographical note for Clark from 1894 provides an earlier testimony.
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Memorial minute for Professor J. B. Clark
FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
April 22, 1938
JOHN BATES CLARK
1847-1938
In recording the death of Professor Emeritus John Bates Clark on March 21, 1938, at the age of ninety-one, the Faculty of Political Science is moved not only by a feeling of loss but also by a feeling of gratitude for great services rendered to mankind.
Born in Providence in 1847 and graduated from Amherst in 1872, Professor Clark set an example followed in the next three decades by scores of young American economists in going to Germany for graduate work. The interests in historical and anthropological studies that he cultivated in Heidelberg and Zürich were lasting characteristics of his mind—a fact often overlooked by commentators upon his later work.
On returning to this country, he began the searching analysis of economic relations that developed gradually into his peculiar contribution to social sciences. A little later than W. Stanley Jevons in England, Karl Menger in Austria, and Leon Walras in France, but quite independently of them and with an emphasis all his own, Professor Clark discovered how the utility of goods influences their values and prices. A collection of his early papers, The Philosophy of Wealth, published in 1885, revealed him as the keenest economic theorist of his time and country.
After teaching at Carleton, Smith, Amherst, and Johns Hopkins, Professor Clark joined this Faculty in 1895. It was while teaching at Columbia that he developed the full implications of his insights. His way of seeking to understand the complicated processes of economic life was to seize upon a set of fundamental factors, and to examine what results they would produce in the absence of disturbing circumstances. Work of this character obviously required logical powers of a high order and constructive imagination. What is less commonly appreciated, to make the results significant the work must be guided by sound intuitive judgments regarding the factors to be admitted to the problems treated and the factors to be excluded. How admirably Professor Clark’s judgment served him and how cogently he reasoned upon the basis of his assumptions were demonstrated by The Distribution of Wealth, published in 1899. That book still stands as the most important contribution of our country to pure economic theory.
Professor Clark’s later books, The Control of the Trusts, 1901, The Problem of Monopoly, 1904, and The Essentials of Economic Theory, 1907, show how effectively he could use his abstract constructions in dealing with practical problems, and how he could bridge the gulf that seemed to yawn between the timeless statis state of his Distribution of Wealth and the ever shifting condition of the work in which real men make their livings.
Of the service that Professor Clark rendered as the first Director of the Division of Economics and History of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, his co-workers in that field can speak with fuller knowledge than we possess. But we may note that no one deficient in a sense of reality, and no one without fervent interest in the welfare of his kind could have planned and carried through as he did the detailed record of the horrible sufferings that the War of 1914-1918 brought upon the world.
With intellectual distinction and integrity there was joined in Professor Clark and innate modesty and a genuine kindliness that won the affection of all who came into personal contact with him. Of what we deem finest in human achievement and character he was an example to be cherished and emulated.
Source: Columbia University Archives. Minutes of the Faculty of Political Science, 1920-1939. pp. 825-6.
Image Source: Amherst Yearbook Olio ’96 (New York, 1894), pp. 7-9. Picture above from frontispiece. Another link.