The first day of 2017 was marred by the death of one of Britain’s greatest economists, Sir Anthony (or Tony as he was universally known) Atkinson.

Tony had worked for decades on how to measure, and tackle, inequality. He was focused not just on inequalities in income and earnings, but also inequality in wealth. And with good reason. Wealth is vastly more unequally distributed than income. It is ownership of wealth that confers security, and often power, in a way that unreliable earnings may not. And while high-earning parents do tend to beget high-earning children, the inheritance of wealth is even more direct.

One of Tony’s important insights was that wealth matters more now than at any time since the 1930s because household wealth has