The Gypsy Economist. The Life and Times of Colin Clark

Abstract

Colin Clark is one of the more puzzling – and frustrating! – figures in the history of twentieth-century economics. This perplexing figure’s life and works have now been the object of an assiduously researched study by Alex Millmow. This biographer acquits himself well, but the present reader is left only slightly less puzzled, and only somewhat more interested, in Colin Clark. Clark was born in 1905 to a Scottish jam manufacturer, who, although living in Plymouth, liked to dress young Colin in a kilt on Sundays. Schooled on a scholarship to Winchester College, Clark read chemistry at Brasenose College, Oxford. On graduation, politics beckoned keenly, and Clark stood as a Labour candidate in the general elections of 1929, 1931 and 1935. By then Keynes’s data man, and under the wing of Hugh Dalton, Clark was well-positioned to stand again for the House of Commons in 1945, win, and enjoy a career similar to that of his fellow Wykehamist-economist-Labourites Richard Crossman and Hugh Gaitskell. Instead, in 1937 he emigrated to Australia, denounced Fabianism as a ‘cranky religious movement’, became a Catholic, adopted an ‘agrarian’ and ‘natalist’ policy outlook, and devoted his time to wide-ranging statistical studies, which both stimulated by their contentiousness and irritated by their carelessness. In postwar Australia, no longer Keynes’s little Mercury winging the precious message to a distant satellite, but now the economic adjunct of B. A. Santamaria, Clark could not obtain academic employment. But thanks to the suggestion of Walter Oakeshott, the medievalist, he secured appointment as director of Oxford’s Agricultural Economics Research Institute. On his return to Oxford, ‘many of his old friends and mentors, Dalton, Jay, Gaitskell ... could not comprehend the enormous ideological change in him’ (214). Rather like Glanvill’s Gypsy Scholar three centuries before, his old ‘friends enquire[d] how he came to lead so odd a life as that was, and to join himself with such a cheating beggarly company’. Finding the Institute ‘intellectually stultifying’, Clark gladly became an honorary research fellow at Monash University, and there seemed to finally find a cheerful perch. Three questions loom.