Drawing on extensive personal correspondence and collected writings, Alex Millmow, who wrote an earlier monograph on his subject, provides the first book-length biographical profile of Clark. Millmow’s aim is to ‘do justice to Clark’s legacy to economic science’ as well as to give more context for his politics, advocacy, and faith. While Milmow’s chronological account of Clark’s life is both sympathetic and sceptical, less clear is whether Clark deserves this heightened scrutiny or rehabilitation, despite his many accomplishments. Considered in the present day, Clark’s contributions on balance have aged poorly given the equity and environmental challenges faced by modern economies, and his anachronistic personal views will likely continue to tarnish his reputation.

One of Clark’s most notable accomplishments came in the early years of his career, which was his development of the concept of gross national product (GNP). Calculated as the aggregate value of a country’s goods and services as produced by its citizens, including those living overseas, GNP allowed governments to have more accurate estimates and forecasts of economic activity than earlier methods. Clark introduced GNP in his second book, National Income and Outlay (1937). His ability to bring together ‘a vast body of heterogeneous data into a consistent picture’ was praised by other leading empirical economists, including Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for developing the similar gross domestic product (GDP) measure.

Despite having studied chemistry at Oxford, Clark and his prowess with numbers drew the attention of Keynes, who appointed him as a junior research assistant in Britain’s Economic Advisory Council in 1930. Their relationship deepened into friendship, which gave Clark access to policymaking circles and led to a Cambridge lectureship. It was there that Douglas Copland, then Dean of the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Melbourne, offered Clark a visiting position in Australia. This short-term sabbatical in 1937 ultimately lengthened into a residency that lasted until Clark’s death in 1989.

Nine of the nineteen chapters in Millmow’s book cover Clark’s time in Australia, much of it as a state government bureaucrat in Queensland after brief forays at various universities around the country. To Clark, Australia (especially Queensland) – with its land and resource abundance, small but egalitarian population, and socially progressive institutions – represented a tabula rasa for economic policymaking. This period also saw Clark dramatically change his ideological perspective, from an economic socialism that embodied Keynesian principles of government intervention to one of laissez-faire capitalism, reduced social welfare support, and minimal taxation. This transformation manifested in Clark’s advocacy for rural development, decreased protectionism, and high population growth. Regularly challenging the Zeitgeist of neo-Malthusianism following World War II, Clark argued that ‘economic progress was impossible without population growth’ and that the world could sustainably support between 47 and 157 billion people following land conversion in the tropics and the use of best agricultural practices.

One explanation for this zeal for larger populations and agricultural production may be found in Clark’s midlife conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1940. While the reasons for his conversion are speculative, in doing so Clark embarked on a new chapter in his career. Finding a champion in B.A. Santamaria, Clark promoted economic policies that were consistent with conservative Catholic doctrines, such as viewing free-market competition as a means to ‘neutralise avarice, envy, gluttony and sloth which were endemic in human nature’. Even more controversial were his misogynistic views and vocal opposition to birth control. Clark’s blurring of the lines between positive and normative analysis aroused discomfort among his colleagues, who, as Millmow notes, considered his economic positions ‘often wrong-headed’ and that he was ‘heavily committed to a particular sectarian and political point of view’. These concerns would dog Clark in his unsuccessful attempts to secure permanent positions in academia, but ultimately he received an honorary research position at Monash University after an interlude at a research institute at Oxford.

In presenting what is largely an intellectual biography of Clark, Millmow displays an admirable even-handedness about his subject. The text is enlivened by the occasional anecdote about Clark, such as his habit of carrying around a slide rule and his dismissal of an undergraduate Bob Hawke as an ‘economic drongo’. However, aside from a few pages on Clark’s family background, much of his personal history remains a mystery. Clark’s fifty-four-year marriage to Marjorie Tattersall, who followed him as he relocated around the world with nine children in tow, seems to have been a source of stability throughout his employment changes, but little is known about his relationship with her or their children. Clark’s Dickensian childhood and long-delayed professional recognition in his adopted home country also seem to be curious bookends, given Millmow’s focus on Clark’s professional endeavours.

Perhaps this lack of personality is not the problem. In the closing paragraph in The Gypsy Economist, Millmow writes that Clark just wanted ‘to be listened to’. With more than one hundred publications across a range of topics, Clark was unquestionably a prolific scholar who had ample opportunity to be heard. That he was also wrong in many of his predictions, including the population ceiling for Australia (twenty-five million) or the maximum feasible taxation on national income (twenty-five per cent), is an important qualification to that legacy. At the same time, would readers believe that Clark might have changed his mind about the benefits of unrestrained population growth and Amazonian deforestation for arable land, given his personal convictions? Are Clark’s misogynistic and nativist views merely ‘puckish’, or do they show him to be on the wrong side of history? Perhaps the absence of a Clark biography until now says more about whether the subject is worth listening to rather than about him suffering from undeserved neglect.