Tony Atkinson influenced profoundly our thinking on poverty, inequality, mobility, public policy and the economics of growth. From his first book, Reference AtkinsonAtkinson (1969), Poverty in Britain and the Reform of Social Security, to his last, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Reference AtkinsonAtkinson, 2015),), he demonstrated the great care and rigour which should characterise serious economics. His approach was identify the issues, examine carefully the facts and the forces that shape them, and ask what we can or should do.
Drawing on his work on inequality and market imperfections, his was one of the clearest voices challenging the ‘market fundamentalism’ of the 1980s and 1990s. He argued that economics had taken a ‘wrong turn’ (Reference Atkinson and SternAtkinson and Stern, 2017). The consequences of that fundamentalism in terms of lives and livelihoods were deeply troubling for Tony. His arguments were based both on its misleading assumptions about behaviour and markets and on its apparent disregard for poverty, inequality and human rights.
He saw markets that were often controlled by the powerful. He saw profoundly damaging externalities go untackled. He saw managers of big firms being able to feather their own nests more or less unchallenged. He saw dangerous dominance of the media by a few of the very rich. He saw, during that time, poverty, inequality and human rights slipping down the agenda. He saw a celebration of behaviour that was narrowly and self-centredly maximising, where consequences for others were dismissed. And he saw a disparagement of the sense of community. Tony saw we could do much better and showed us how.
Tony was a builder of institutions. He founded the Journal of Public Economics in 1971 and was editor for nearly two decades. With Mervyn King and myself, he initiated at the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD), in the London School of Economics (LSE), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) programme on ‘Taxation, Incentives and the Distribution of Income’ which lasted for 12 years coinciding with his time at the School. Tony recognised very early the great value in household data sets for understanding the distributional consequences of policy.
He was a much-loved Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, and had a lasting influence on the economics departments of the University of Essex and University College London. In both his teaching and his research, he insisted on the importance of institutions and in so doing, straddled many disciplines. And within economics he stressed the importance of being an economist without a qualifier, that is, not simply a trade economist, or a macroeconomist or a labour economist.
He was a great European; the majority of his many honorary doctorates were from European non-UK universities. He worked in a hospital in a deprived area of Hamburg before going to university. He was involved in the economic analysis of the potential effects of joining the European Economic Community in the early 1970s prior to the referendum on joining in 1975. He was President of the Luxembourg Income Study from 2011 which has made a great contribution to international comparisons of well-being and inequality. He was a member of France’s Counseil d’Analyse Economique, 1997–2001, and was Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
He was the finest of human beings. His decency, humanity and integrity were profound and extraordinary. He was quiet and understated but deep and strong. He was charming, and he could be very funny, including irony of the highest class. He was a special colleague, always ready with his support and wisdom. He had a wonderful gift of friendship; notwithstanding his great commitments and his constant writing of books and papers, you knew that Tony was there for you.
He met his wife Judith (neé Mandeville) at Cambridge as undergraduates when they were 19. They were married for more than 50 years. They shared and reinforced their commitment to making the world a better place and tackling injustice.
