Anthony Barnes 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.

Education and career 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. 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 never did a PhD. He co-edited it for the next quarter century.

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

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'.

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.'

Work Atkinson's work was predominantly on income distributions. But he also worked on a wide field of other economic and social questions including taxation, wealth distribution, the economics of the welfare state, health economics, and poverty. In his long career he published over 350 research papers and authored 24 books. Characteristic for much of his work is a combination of theoretical and applied perspectives.

Inequality His 1970 paper 'On the measurement of inequality' radically changed the way that economists think about the measurement of inequality. One contribution of this paper is that it introduced a new family of inequality measures that makes different views about distributional justice explicit through a parameter capturing the ‘inequality aversion’ of the measurer. This inequality measure–called the Atkinson index–is named after him.

Atkinson examined how the wealthy disproportionately influence public policy and influence governments to implement policies that protect wealth. He also advocated the introduction of a basic income.

He was one of the authors of the Chartbook of Economic Inequality, a resource widely employed to study the history of inequality.

Global poverty He had a long-standing interest in the measurement of poverty. One of his most cited research papers is ‘On the measurement of poverty' from 1987.

From 2013 to 2016 he chaired the World Bank's Commission on Global Poverty. The commission included Amartya Sen, Ana Revenga, François Bourguignon, Stefan Dercon and Nora Lustig and had the objective to advise the international institutions on how to measure and monitor global poverty. The commission is usually referred to as the Atkinson Commission.

Before his death he was working on a book on global poverty. Atkinson died before he was able to complete the book, but at his request it was edited for publication by two of his colleagues, John Micklewright and Andrea Brandolini. This book–'Measuring Poverty around the World'–was published posthumously in May 2019.

Public economics Since the 1960s he was one of the leading scholars to develop the discipline of public economics.

In a joint article with Joseph Stiglitz, he laid one of the cornerstones for the theory of optimal taxation.

Also jointly with Joseph Stiglitz he authored the seminal textbook “Lectures on Public Economics”. The book was reissued by Princeton University Press in 2015.

In his 2015 publication Inequality: What Can Be Done?, he "called for robust taxation of the rich whom he reckons have got off easily over the last generation."

He recommended government intervention in markets such as employment guarantees and wage controls to influence the redistribution of economic rewards.

Nobel laureate Angus Deaton recalled the first economics seminar he ever attended: "the first seminar I ever heard in economics, in Cambridge in 1969, was Tony presenting his famous paper on the measurement of inequality. It made me think that economics was a pretty cool subject, I thought all economics talks were like this, and it ruined me for a lifetime of seminars."

He had a large influence on the next generation of researchers. Atkinson advised at least sixty PhD students and 'in addition there are many other younger scholars whom he influenced directly through his collaboration on joint research project'.

He was President of the Econometric Society in 1988. He was knighted in 2000 and made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2001. He was the first person to be honoured with the A.SK Social Science Award by the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB Social Science Center in Berlin) in 2007. He was president of the board of the Luxembourg Income Study, having advised on its creation in the 1980s.

In 2016, Atkinson received the Dan David Prize for 'combatting poverty'.

He received 19 honorary doctorates.

Personal life and death Atkinson was married to Judith Mandeville, whom he met at Cambridge as an undergraduate. The couple had three children and eight grandchildren.

He was a sailor and walker.