3. Cambridge and Fabianism

This chapter deals with Colin Clark’s time at Cambridge University, his friendship with J. M. Keynes who had recommended his appointment after Clark had resigned from the EAC after rejecting the idea of putting his name to a protectionist manifesto. The Cambridge appointment would be the making of Clark as an applied and statistical economist and allowed him a front row seat at the Keynesian revolution to which he provided some aggregative concepts. In the early 1930s Clark became private secretary to Clement Attlee, a junior minister within the Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government. Apart from drafting Labour Party policy resolutions and its 1931 electoral manifesto, Clark provided statistical advice to Labour politicians. With his colleagues, Clark laid down the intellectual foundations for Labour’s socialist platform using Keynes’s new theory. He ran for a parliamentary seat in three general elections but markedly without success. In 1935 he married the love of his life Marjorie Tattersall and relinquished hopes of becoming a politician.