Tony Atkinson and Cambridge, England

Tony went up to Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1963 intending to study mathematics, and he completed Part I before transferring to economics. His interest and engagement in social problems was long standing, however. He had spent 11 months working for IBM (thinking he might go into computing), and then six months in a hospital in a deprived area of Hamburg, taking along reading matter such as John Hicks’s Social Framework and Joan Robinson’s Economic Philosophy. It was on an early outing of the Student Community Action volunteer society that Tony met his future wife and fellow social conscience, Judith (they married in Tony’s third year).

Tony has remarked on how lucky he feels to have been at Cambridge in the mid-1960s, citing several contributing factors. Compared to today, it felt as if there was relatively little to learn—one was directly at the frontiers of the subject. The reading was not of textbooks but recent journal articles and surveys such as Hahn and Matthews’s (1964) review of economic growth theory in the Economic Journal, Chipmans (1965a, 1965b, 1966) three-part review of international trade theory in Econometrica, and Mishans (1960) review of welfare economics in the Economic Journal. There was a general air of excitement concerning the role that economics could play in public policy; it was integral to thinking about social as well as economic issues. Many Cambridge economists were actively involved in advising the then new Labour government. James Meade was writing not only academic articles and books (e.g. Meade 1964), but also the Institute of Economic Affairs’ Hobart Papers on topics such as Britain’s role in the Commonwealth and European Union (EU) (Meade 1962).

Economics was taught as an integrated subject with less of a clear-cut divide between theory and applied work than in today’s mainstream core (a distinguishing feature of Tony’s own research, as I explain below). The Tripos courses were Economic Principles and Economic Problems, for instance, not Microeconomics and Macroeconomics. Teaching included economic statistics in general and national income accounting in particular (the Blue Book was a required purchase). However, econometrics was not well developed in the curriculum, and Tony has remarked how he found his time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (see below) an eye-opener in this respect.

There were influential teachers such as Jan Graaf and Frank Hahn (Tony’s college Tutors), Richard Goodwin, Michael Farrell, Brian Reddaway, and especially James Meade. Visitors included Peter Diamond, Jacques Dreze, Edmund Malinvaud, Joe Stiglitz, and Christian von Weizsacker. There were colleagues such as Partha Dasgupta, Geoff Heal, and David Newbery and older Faculty members such as James Mirrlees. Interaction was facilitated by a strong tradition of having coffee together each morning in the Faculty Common Room.

In the summer of his third year (1967), Tony benefited from Hahn’s long-standing exchange programme with MIT: Cambridge, England, led to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Tony was a research assistant to Robert Solow and made lifelong connections with people such as Avinash Dixit and Robert Hall (with whom he shared an office) and also interacted with William Branson, Robert Gordon, Bronwyn Hall, William Nordhaus, Michael Rothschild, Karl Shell, Eytan Sheshinski, Joe Stiglitz, and Martin Weitzman.

Tony returned to Cambridge, England, to take up a Fellowship at St John’s College and then also a University Lectureship (1967-1971). He subsequently moved to chairs at the University of Essex (1971-1975), University College London (1976-1979), and the London School of Economics (LSE) (19801992). He briefly returned to Cambridge as Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of Churchill College (1992-1994) before becoming Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford (1994-2005). Tony remains an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College and is also a Centennial Professor at the LSE. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College and so, as he said when accepting the post, he has now come full circle in Cambridge terms.

Tony’s return to Cambridge at the end of the 1960s was the period when he learnt public finance in order to teach it, he says. From such beginnings came his magisterial textbook with Stiglitz (Lectures on Public Economics, 1980, republished 2015), and his founding editorship of the influential Journal of Public Economics (1971-1997), with the collaboration of co-editors Martin Feldstein, Leif Johansen, Joe Stiglitz, and (from 1973) Nick Stern.

The Cambridge integration of economic principles and empirical analysis of a major public policy issue emerged in Tony’s first book, Poverty in Britain and the Reform of Social Security (Atkinson 1969a). Brian Reddaway was very supportive of this work, and James Meade was interested in it as well, though Tony has remarked that poverty was not generally seen at that time as a subject for economics.

Tony’s Fellowship period was also when his first journal articles appeared— in both economic growth and economic inequality. The first two published articles fully reflect the spirit of the time, and have connections to the two Cambridges, the places of his formation. In his 1969 Review of Economic Studies paper, Tony uncovers an overlooked property of the standard model of economic growth as well as two other contemporary models, that with heterogeneous capital goods due to Shell and Stiglitz (1967) and the Marxian- Keynesian growth-cycle model developed by Goodwin (1967), one of his Cambridge (England) teachers. The motivation of Tony’s article is clearly spelled out at the outset:

[T]he speed of change is a prediction of the model, and by examining this we have a further test of the model’s properties ... If we throw away information about the time dimension, we are reducing still further our limited understanding of the relationship between these models and the real world (Atkinson 1969b: 137).

Tony then goes on to argue that the ‘stylized fact’ that factor shares are broadly constant over time cannot be a reason to reject the plausibility of capital-augmenting technical progress if the convergence to the long-run equilibrium takes a very long time.

In Tony’s Economic Journal paper with Stiglitz (Atkinson and Stiglitz 1969), technical progress is suggested to be local, that is, confined to some techniques, so that the production function does not change smoothly: ‘The view of technical progress presented in this note contrasts sharply with the dominant mathematical theories of growth, which are essentially ahistorical in character. Where technical progress is localised, history is very important’ (ibid.: 577). According to Daron Acemoglu, this paper ‘was ahead of its time in. challenging the orthodoxy in the modelling of technological change’ (Acemoglu 2015: 456).

In addition to their importance for economics, these first articles already reveal distinctive characteristics of Tony’s lifelong approach to research: the need to work out the full implications of theoretical models, an open-minded attitude to alternative modelling choices matched by an awareness of the limits of these models, careful alignment of data and theory, and attention to historical developments.

Tony has also said that he benefited throughout his career from having wonderful collaborators—and that is what they say about him too! According to Tony, his generation was perhaps the first to be routinely engaged in joint authorship, often internationally, and he has said that it has meant a great deal to him personally. These interactions are perhaps a modern equivalent of those that Tony first experienced in the Common Room of the Cambridge Faculty of Economics.