Portrait of Tony Atkinson

Birthday profile

Tony Atkinson

Tony Atkinson, English economist and academic (died 2017)

Born
September 4, 1944
Died
January 1, 2017
Zodiac sign
Virgo
Birth year
1944

About Tony Atkinson

Sir Anthony Barnes Atkinson was a British economist, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and senior research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. Atkinson became first interested in economics because of his experiences in Hamburg of the 1960s, but also credited the book The Poor and the Poorest, by Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, as having a large influence on his career goals. Atkinson, who worked on inequality and poverty for more than four decades, was a mentor to Thomas Piketty (author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century); they worked together on building an historical database on top incomes.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when Tony Atkinson was born

Tony Atkinson was born in 1944. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1944

  • #1 song"Swinging on a Star" – Bing Crosby
  • Top movieGoing My Way
  • Best-selling bookStrange Fruit – Lillian Smith

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentGreen Bay Packers win NFL Championship
  • Top headlineD-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6
  • Technology milestoneHarvard Mark I computer begins operations
  • Defining fadBobby socks
  • Notable inventionKidney dialysis machine
  • World population2.39 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderFranklin D. Roosevelt
  • Sports championSt. Louis Cardinals (World Series)
  • U.S. population138.4M

1944 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Tony Atkinson's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19442026
Gas$0.21$3.45/gal
Average home$5,800$435,000
Average income$4,200$67,500
Minimum wage$0.30$7.25/hr (federal)
Movie ticket$0.27$11.95
Postage stamp$0.03$0.73
Population138.4M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.