Quotes from Anthony B. Atkinson

if the wealthiest fraction of a society feel that they can afford to insulate themselves from the common fate and buy their way out of the common institutions, that is also a form of social isolation.

what thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice a problem of riches.

Inequality of outcome among today's generation is the source of the unfair advantage received by the next generation. If we are concerned about equality of opportunity tomorrow, we need to be concerned about inequality of outcome today.

Indeed, in many OECD countries unemployment was very low. One prime minister of New Zealand claimed to know personally all the unemployed in his country; this may well have been true, since according to International Labour Organisation (ILO) statistics, in 1955 there were only fifty-five unemployed people in his country.

As we saw earlier, over half of UK ordinary shares are owned by "rest of the world" investors. The notion of "social responsibility" applies to a particular society, and it is not clear that overseas shareholders have a long-term commitment to the country in which they are investing.

competition policy should embody explicit distributional concerns. It

In 1960 the US Census reported that 9 per cent of children lived in a family with one parent; by 2010 this had increased to 27 per cent. In the UK today, there is a similar proportion:

less inequality is associated with greater macroeconomic stability and more sustainable growth.

it is wrong to see today's high inequality as the product of forces over which we have no control,

Plato, who expressed the view that no one should be more than four times richer than the poorest member of the society.

On a standard-of-living approach it may be legitimate to set different poverty lines for men and women, on the grounds that women have on average smaller nutritional needs, and this was indeed the case with the US official poverty line in its early years. The poverty line for 1963 set by Mollie Orshansky for non-farmers under the age of sixty-five was $1,650 a year for a single man but only $1,525 for a single woman.