Sir Anthony Barnes Atkinson[1] CBE FBA (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.
[2] A student of James Meade, Atkinson virtually single-handedly established the modern British field of inequality and poverty studies.
After one year he left and moved to Hamburg to volunteer in a hospital in a deprived part of town.
[6] 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.
At the LSE he co-directed for 12 years the research programme ‘Taxation, incentives and the distribution of income’.
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.
[6] 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.
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.
[3] He presented a set of policies regarding technology, employment, social security, the sharing of capital, and taxation that could shift the inequality in income distribution in developed countries.
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.
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.
In a joint article with Joseph Stiglitz, he laid one of the cornerstones for the theory of optimal taxation.
[23] Also jointly with Joseph Stiglitz he authored the seminal textbook “Lectures on Public Economics”.
[24] 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.
"[3][25][26] He recommended government intervention in markets such as employment guarantees and wage controls to influence the redistribution of economic rewards.
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'.
[6] He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984, a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1974, Honorary Member of the American Economic Association in 1985 and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994.