John Bates Clark was an economist at Columbia University. He is best known for his contributions to marginal productivity theory and the fact that an award given annually is named after him. The John Bates Clark Award is given by the Americ an Economic Association to "the best economist under age forty". He was a neoclassical economist, in fact, he was among the economists who brought the neoclassical revolution to fruition. The others were: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Vilfredo Pareto, Knu t Wicksell, Phillip Wicksteed, and Alfred Marshall.

Thorstein Veblen, an outspoken critic of neoclassical economics, believed however, that Clark's work on marginal productivity has been the most ingenious and most promising work on this theory, and thus, uses Clark's theory to show the limitations of m arginal utility.. According to Veblen, in "The Limitation of Marginal Utility" in the Journal of Political Economy:

"The Limitations of the Marginal-utility economics are sharp and characteristic. It is from first to last a doctrine of value, and in point of form and method it is a thoery of valuation. The whole system, therefore, lies within the theoreti cal field of distribution, and it has but a secondary bearing on any other economic phenomena than those of distribution--the term being taken in its accepted sense of pecuniary distribution, or distribution in point of ownership. Now and again an attemp t is made to extend the use of the principle of marginal utility beyond this range, so as to apply it to questions of production, but hitherto without sensible effects, and necessarily so. The most ingenious and the most promising of such attempts have b een those of Mr. Clark, whose work marks the extreme range of endeavor and the extreme degree of success in so seeking to turn a postulate of distribution to account for a theory of production. But the outcome has been a doctrine of the production of val ues, and value, in Mr. Clark's as in other utitlity systems, is a matter of valuation; which throws the whole excursion back into the field of distribution. Similarly, as regards attempts to make use of this principle in an analysis of the phenomena of c onsumption, the best results arrived at are some formulation of the pecuniary distribution of consumption goods."

Works by John Bates Clark:

• The Distribution of Wealth
  
• Essentials of Economic Theory
  

Click on the icon to return to the list of economists.