Anthony B. Atkinson (1944-)

Stephen P. Jenkins

Introduction

It is an honour to write about Anthony (Tony) Atkinson’s contributions to economics and his links with the University of Cambridge where he was both student and Faculty member. From a personal point of view, I owe Tony a huge amount for his exemplary supervision of my doctoral thesis, his friendly but incisive comments on later research, and his ever-present general encouragement, support, and inspiration. For more than 35 years, answering the ‘What would Tony think?’ question has been a means by which I and many of my contemporaries have assessed our own research. (Our salutes to him are collected in Jenkins and Micklewright 2007.) These personal benefits are of course separate from the immense contributions to economics that Tony has made, many of which had their gestation and nurturing in a Cambridge context. It is these public dimensions that I focus on in this chapter.

I owe Andrea Brandolini and John Micklewright many heartfelt thanks for their substantial contributions. The remarks attributed to Tony Atkinson derive from an interview that Andrea, John, and I did with Tony in October 2014. We thank Tony and Judith Atkinson for their generous hospitality and provision of information about the Cambridge years. The research for this chapter was partially supported by core funding of the Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at the Institute for Social and Economic Research by the University of Essex and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (award ES/L0009153).

S.P. Jenkins (h)

Professor of Economic and Social Policy, Department of Social Policy,

London School of Economics, UK e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_52

Tony Atkinson has made fundamental and original theoretical contributions to economics in general, and to public economics and the analysis of economic inequality in particular. He has also undertaken original and innovative empirical analysis of economic inequalities, and of their relationship to economic institutions such as the welfare state. His work has brought the analysis of distributional issues back to a central position in economics, arguably a position that it has not had since the period of the classical economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is no overstatement to say that the modern analysis of economic inequality started with Tony’s 1970 paper in the Journal of Economic Theory.

The rest of this chapter substantiates these remarks. (I do not talk about Tony’s considerable influence on other social science disciplines such as social policy and social statistics.) First, I provide some Cambridge context. Second, I describe Tony’s theoretical contributions to the analysis of economic inequality and then broaden the scope to highlight his contributions more widely to public economics and to the understanding of contemporary society and public policy. Tony’s integrative role is a topic I return to in the concluding section.