Hugh Dalton (1887–1962)

Abstract

Hugh Dalton combined a brief but very successful academic career, spent entirely at LSE, with a deep commitment to the Labour Party. Cassell Reader in Economics from 1920 to 1935, when he resigned in order to devote himself to politics, Dalton published important work on public finance, the distribution of income and wealth and the economics of socialism. His authoritative textbook, Principles of Public Finance, was still selling well in the early 1950s having first appeared in 1922, and his 1920 article on ‘The Measurement of the Inequality of Incomes’ was rediscovered in the 1970s and has been very widely cited ever since. Dalton was essentially a pre-Keynesian economist, who applied A.C. Pigou’s neoclassical microeconomics to develop a surprisingly radical brand of democratic socialism.