Tony Atkinson

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.

Atkinson died on 1 January 2017 from multiple myeloma in Oxford, England, aged 72.

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

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."

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.

He served as Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2005. In 1971 he founded the Journal of Public Economics. He co-edited it for the next quarter century.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

He recommended government intervention in markets such as employment guarantees and wage controls to influence the redistribution of economic rewards. He traced the history of inequality, coining the phrase the "inequality turn" to describe the period when household inequality began to rise around 1980. From the 1980s onwards, men and women "tended to marry those who earned like themselves", with rich women marrying rich men. As more women joined the workforce inequality increased.

In 1971, at the age of 27, he became full professor of economics at the University of Essex. In 1976 he became professor of political economy at University College London.

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.

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."

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”.

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.

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'. 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.

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

Sir Anthony Barnes Atkinson 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.