George Shackle (1903-1992), notable economist and historian of economic thought, renamed the interwar period as “the years of the high theory”, when an extraordinary intellectual fervor invested Western economic thought, bringing about significant innovations and advances on the methodological, theoretical and economic policy planes (Shackle 1983). During this period the issue of income distribution and possible adoption of schemes of guaranteed minimum income was extensively discussed among the most refined economists of the day. In this respect, the aim of this work is to look at ideas of social welfare in the works of James Edward Meade (1907-1995) from the early 1930s to 1948.