John Bates Clark

John Bates Clark (26 January 1847 – 21 March 1938) was an American neo-classical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics, and spent most of his career as a teacher of Columbia University.

Clark was born and raised in Providence, R. I. and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts at the age of 25. From 1872 to 1875 he attended the University of Zurich where he studied under Karl Knies (a leader of the German Historical School). Early in his career Clark's writings reflected his German Socialist background and showed him as a critic of capitalism. Upon his return to the United States, Clark taught economics, history and a whole series of other subjects.

In The Philosophy of Wealth (1886), Clark presented an original version of marginal utility theory, a decade and a half after the simultaneous discovery of this principle by Jevons, Menger, and Walras. Clark is famous for his use of marginal productivity which explains the distribution of income. In his 1848 Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill asserted that production and distribution were two distinct spheres. While production was the result of physical principles, such as the Law of Diminishing Returns, distribution was the result of social and political choice. Clark theorized that with homogeneous labor, perfectly competitive firms, and diminishing marginal products, firms hired labor up to the point where the real wage was equal to the marginal product of labor. Thus he showed the intimate connection of production and distribution. This idea is now in virtually all modern microeconomics texts as the explanation for the demand for labor.

Clark writes in the preface to The Distribution of Wealth that His countryman Henry George primarily inspired Clark in his work.

However, both Clark's son, John Maurice Clark, and John Henry both contend that Clark developed the theory as a response to Karl Marx, who claimed that the surplus value the workers created exploited them. It is possible that Clark had both Henry George and Karl Marx in mind.

The John Bates Clark Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of economics, is named after him.

J. B. Clark was the father of John Maurice Clark, who did not follow his father's conservative footsteps -- instead, he became a leading Institutionalist.