Tony Atkinson

Sir Anthony Barnes Atkinson (4 September 1944 – 1 January 2017) was a British economist, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and senior research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.

A student of James Meade, Atkinson virtually single-handedly established the modern British field of inequality and poverty studies.

He worked on inequality and poverty for over four decades.

Atkinson was born in Caerleon, a town in southern Wales near the border with England.

Atkinson grew up in north Kent and attended Cranbrook School.

After leaving school at the age of 17 he worked for IBM.

After one year he left and moved to Hamburg to volunteer in a hospital in a deprived part of town.

He cited his interest in inequality as beginning from this period as a volunteering in a German hospital and from studying the work of Peter Townsend.

Atkinson became first interested in economics because of his experiences in Hamburg of the 1960s, but also credited the book The Poor and the Poorest, by Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, as having a large influence on his career goals.

He was impressed by this account of poverty.

At the same time he 'felt that it did not address what to do about the problem'.

After studying mathematics at Churchill College, Cambridge for one year he changed to economics, graduating from the University of Cambridge in 1966 with a first-class degree.

Subsequently, he spent time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At MIT he attended Robert Solow's seminal growth theory course and worked as a research assistant of Solow.

After returning from MIT he considered writing a PhD thesis on development economics, but eventually never did a PhD.

From 1967 to 1971 he was a fellow at St John's College, Cambridge.

There he taught public economics together with Joseph Stiglitz.

These lectures were later turned into the famous textbook “Lectures on Public Economics”.

This motivated him to provide this missing piece and he published his answer in 'Poverty in Britain and the Reform of Social Security' in 1969.

The same was true for the study of inequality.

He mentored Thomas Piketty and collaborated with him repeatedly.

But he felt that his analysis in Capital was a description of the problem, what was missing was the solution.

This again motivated Atkinson 'to go further and show how inequality could actually be reduced in practice' and to write 'Inequality – what can be done?'.

Several have remarked on Atkinson's optimism that progress is possible.

Atkinson's colleague Max Roser wrote that 'one of [Atkinson's] convictions – apparent in all his writing – was that high levels of economic inequality are not inevitable.

Even when the public discourse suggested that nothing could be done to counter the rise of inequality, Tony not only stood by his conviction, but wrote an entire book entitled Inequality – What can be done?'.

In turn, Atkinson also emphasized the optimism of his teacher James Meade writing, 'Above all, James had a positive vision for the future.

He was, in his own words, ‘an inveterate explorer of improvements in economic arrangements’...

he wrote that ‘I implore any of my fellow countrymen who read this book not to object: “It can’t be done.” He was ultimately concerned with what could be done to make our world a better place.'

In 1971, at the age of 27, he became full professor of economics at the University of Essex.

In 1971 he founded the Journal of Public Economics.

He co-edited it for the next quarter century.

Several authors have emphasized that some core principles motivate Atkinson's work.

In 1976 he became professor of political economy at University College London.

During the 1980s he was Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics in the Economics Department at the London School of Economics.

At the LSE he co-directed for 12 years the research programme ‘Taxation, incentives and the distribution of income’.

His co-directors were Nick Stern and Mervyn King.

In the 1990s he was advisor to the French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

He stayed there until 1992 when he returned to the University of Cambridge for two more years.

He served as Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2005.