Anthony Barnes Atkinson was born in Caerleon, United Kingdom on September 4, 1944. He received a bachelor's degree in 1966 from Churchill College, Cambridge. He was a fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge, from 1967 to 1971, a professor of economics at the University of Essex from 1971 to 1976, and a professor of political economy at University College, London, from 1976 to 1979. He taught at the London School of Economics from 1980 to 1992. He then returned to Cambridge, where he taught for two years, before moving to Nuffield College, where he taught from 1994 to 2005.
As an economist, he studied the changes in the distribution of wealth and income, which allowed for a better understanding of poverty and inequality. He along with other scholars organized the World Wealth and Income Database, a resource for the comparative study of inequality. He wrote more than 40 books including The Distribution of Personal Wealth in Britain written with A. J. Harrison, Lectures on Public Economics written with Joseph E. Stiglitz, and Inequality: What Can Be Done? He died from myeloma on January 1, 2017 at the age of 72.
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