Colin Clark

Colin Grant Clark (2 November 1905 – 4 September 1989) was a British and Australian economist and statistician who worked in both the United Kingdom and Australia. He pioneered the use of gross national product (GNP) as the basis for studying national economies. Early years Colin Clark was born in London in 1905 and was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, then at Winchester College. He subsequently attended Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated in chemistry in 1928. After graduation he worked as a research assistant with William Beveridge at the London School of Economics (1928–29) and then with Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders and Allyn Young at the University of Liverpool (1929–30). During this time he ran unsuccessful campaigns to be elected to parliament for the Labour Party in the constituency of North Dorset (1929), and later at Liverpool Wavertree (1931) and South Norfolk (1935). In 1930 he was appointed a research assistant to the National Economic Advisory Council newly convened by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. He resigned shortly after his appointment, after being asked to write a background memorandum to make a case for protectionism. Despite this, he had sufficiently impressed one of the council members (John Maynard Keynes) to secure an appointment as a lecturer in statistics at Cambridge University. Lecturer at Cambridge At Cambridge, he was a lecturer in statistics from 1931 to 1938. There he also completed three books: The National Income 1924–31 (1932), The Economic Position of Great Britain (jointly with A. C. Pigou) (1936) and National Income and Outlay (1937). His first book was sent to the publisher Daniel Macmillan with a recommendation from John Maynard Keynes: "[...] Clark is, I think, a bit of a genius: almost the only economic statistician I have ever met who seems to me quite first-class."