Like the conscientious welfare economist he was, whenever Wilfred Beckerman gave money to beggars, he would tell his children: “I’m doing my bit for the redistribution of income.” It was a subject close to his heart. With his flowing silvery locks and hooded, twinkly eyes, he was always optimistic that the big problems were solvable. “Mankind may be messing up the planet,” he said, “but mankind also has the wit to devise rational policies to save it.”
In the 1950s the widespread answer to many economic problems lay in one word: growth. Beckerman was drawn to the Labour politician Anthony Crosland’s influential 1956 book The Future of Socialism, which argued that a bigger economic cake made it easier to redistribute wealth to the poor. That