‘Otto’ Clarke

Abstract

Among those who engage themselves on public affairs there is a very occasional, very rare bird who has such skills of originality and power of mind that when he has run his course modes of thought and patterns of action in some particular area are never the same again, and certainly not the same as they would have been if that course had never been run at all. Most of us know full well that whatever we may do would surely have been done, very similarly, by others if we had never existed. With the rare birds it is quite different. And so rare are they that I can think of only two civil servants in my lifetime who have been of this sort, one being Warren Fisher and the other Otto [Clarke]. An odd comparison? I do not think so. I am talking about something of which Maynard Keynes is the supreme modern example. Fisher, as a result of his work between the wars not only transformed the Civil Service but left it, I believe, something quite different from what it would have been if he had never been born. In a similar fashion Otto [Clarke] in the sixties put his own stamp on many aspects of government finance and economics — and these things will never be the same again.