John Maurice Clark

John Maurice Clark (born Nov. 30, 1884, Northampton, Mass., U.S.—died June 27, 1963, Westport, Conn.) was an American economist whose work on trusts brought him world renown and whose ideas anticipated those of John Maynard Keynes.

Clark graduated from Amherst College in 1905 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1910. He subsequently held posts at several institutions, including the University of Chicago (1915–26), and he returned to Columbia in 1926, retiring in 1953. Clark was the son of a noted American economist, John Bates Clark, and he always acknowledged the importance of his father, with whom he produced, in 1912, a revision of an earlier work of Clark senior, The Control of Trusts.

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Clark’s name has been largely associated with industrial economics and competition. He is perhaps best remembered for the introduction of the concept of workable competition, as developed in Competition as a Dynamic Process (1961). This book stresses the flexibility of the economic system, the limits to market power, and the importance of potential competition, a theme also emphasized by his father. Clark’s argument that perfect competition is both theoretically and practically unattainable became the approach adopted by antitrust authorities throughout the world. In Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs (1923), Clark developed his theory of the acceleration principle—that investment demand can fluctuate severely if consumer demand fluctuations exhaust existing productive capacity. His subsequent study of variations in consumer demand as a source of fluctuations in total demand raised some of the issues later treated by Keynes. A wide-ranging theorist, Clark also studied the economic costs of war, public works, and the labour market.