John Maurice Clark's contribution to the genesis of the multiplier analysis: a response to Luca Fiorito

Abstract

Luca Fiorito has made a valuable contribution by publishing several inter esting letters by and John Maurice Clark on macroeconomic topics. However, Fiorito claims that this correspondence establishes the claims made by Dorfman (1959; 1970) for Clark as an anticipator of Keynesian defi cit-financed fiscal expansion and an independent discoverer of the multipli er According Fiorito, Hints at Clark's studies on the multipli er are be found in [Dorfman 1959] but, as Fiorito's own quotations from Dorfman show, Dorfman presented the argument quite clearly and explic itly, not just as hints. The correspondence published by Fiorito, while very interesting in other respects, does nothing whatsoever to confute Dimand's critique and confirm the thesis of Clark's independent discovery of the multiplier principle. Any such confutation would have be based on what Clark wrote in the 1930s, not on claims made twenty years later. There is nothing on this issue in Clark's letters Samuelson and Dorfman that goes beyond what has already been published by Dorfman (1959; 1970) or beyond the footnote in Clark (1935c, 85-86, fn.) stating the single paragraph on the finite-valued spending multiplier was written independently of Kahn (1933), and by implication also Kahn (1931) and Keynes (1933) It remains the case that:

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.