Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

If you have ever referred to 'the one per cent', you are using the work of Tony Atkinson. Tony, who died on New Year's Day this year, aged 72, contributed as much as any modern economist to the study of poverty and inequality.

When I first met Tony in the early 2000s, I was struck by the contrast between his exalted status and his willingness to engage with a mere PhD student. He was the head of Oxford's prestigious Nuffield College, and had recently been knighted by both the British and French governments. It always made me smile when I thought about the fact that the only 'Sir' that I knew well was my inequality co-author.

Trained originally as a mathematician, Tony could crunch numbers with the best of them. But, like Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, he recognised the importance of economics being grounded in history and politics. He was generous to his intellectual predecessors, like his Cambridge teachers James Meade and Joan Robinson. When we worked together on Australia and New Zealand, he made sure that our articles acknowledged the groundbreaking work of Australian researchers like Timothy Coghlan and Colin Clark.

Tony was the youngest of three sons of Norman, a carpentry teacher, and his wife, Esther. He was born in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, while his mother was evacuated to Wales during the Second World War, and educated as a boarder at Cranbrook school in Kent. His mother had looked after around a dozen evacuee children during the war, and, before going to university, Tony worked in a hospital in a deprived area of Hamburg.

Over the next five decades, there was virtually no aspect of the field of inequality that he left untouched. He created his own inequality measure, which others referred to as the Atkinson index; devised a novel technique for estimating wealth inequality from inheritance data; and shook up public finance through his work on optimal taxation with Joseph Stiglitz, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize.

He founded the Journal of Public Economics and edited it for the early period of its history. As Nicholas Stern noted in his obituary for Tony in the Guardian:

He was amazingly prolific, averaging close to a book and seven published articles each year over a professional career of five decades.

As Frank Cowell has put it, Tony Atkinson:

… acquired a nickname, "The Twins." It seemed impossible that one person alone could so successfully be doing so many different things at the same time …

He moved through a range of British economics departments, including University College London and the London School of Economics. As one British economist remarked to me, he seemed to leave each department friendlier and more collegial than it had been when he arrived.

Amidst it all, Tony made major contributions to policy. He once told me the story of how he had built the first computer model to analyse a British budget, and surprised the Thatcher government by helping the Labour opposition to estimate the distributional impact of a proposed tax cut before the chancellor had finished speaking. In 2005, the seminal Atkinson review took a fresh look at how to analyse the output of a government. In 2008, he produced the definitive study of inequality in advanced countries for the OECD. In 2016, he chaired the World Bank's Commission on Global Poverty, taking a fresh look at the question of what constitutes extreme poverty in the poorest nations.

Perhaps the achievement for which Tony will most be remembered is his study of top income shares, such as the top one per cent. After Thomas Piketty showed how taxation statistics and other national data could be used to produce long-run inequality estimates for France, Tony did the same for the United Kingdom. Tony eventually produced top incomes estimates for nearly 20 other nations, of which our collaboration on Australia and New Zealand was a small part.

What distinguished this work from previous research is that the estimates went back a century or more. For the English-speaking nations, the pattern was strikingly similar. In Canada, the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, inequality had been very high around World War I before falling through the Great Depression and the aftermath of World War II. Since the late 1970s, the share of the top 1 percent has approximately doubled.

He worked with Thomas Piketty on a herculean research effort, forming a key source for Piketty's bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Meanwhile, Tony had learned that he did not have long to live and set about writing what he knew would be his final book. Titled Inequality: What Can be Done?, it focused on policy solutions to the rising gap between rich and poor, including guaranteed public employment at the minimum wage, encouraging innovation that improves employability, stronger union power and more foreign aid. Atkinson also proposed that competition policy should explicitly take account of inequality—an idea that found its way into my party's election policies at the last election.

I last saw Tony and his wife, Judith Mandeville, when I stayed at their home in May 2015. By coincidence, I arrived on the evening of the national election. We talked for much of the next day about why the British Labour Party, of which he had once been a member, had been given another thumping by the electorate. Tony was thoughtful, funny and wise as we walked around Oxford, watching spring cricket and discussing questions like whether robots would take the jobs.

In his generosity and intellect, Tony was the best of scholars. I feel lucky to have known him as a mentor, a co-author and a friend.

See this speech in context