Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.” (View Highlight)
Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the most talked-about philosophy book of the time; two years later, he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English, Mind. G. E. Moore, the journal’s editor, who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up, confessed that he was “distinctly nervous” when this first-year student was in the audience, because he was “very much cleverer than I was.” John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and intellectual prowess. (View Highlight)
When Ramsey later published a paper about rates of saving, Keynes called it “one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made.” Its most controversial idea was that the well-being of future generations should be given the same weight as that of the present one. Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.” In the wake of the Great Depression, economists had more pressing concerns; only decades later did the paper’s enormous impact arrive. (View Highlight)
Philosophers sometimes play the game of imagining how twentieth-century thought might have been different if Ramsey had survived and his ideas had caught on earlier. That exercise has become more entertaining with the publication of the first full biography of him, “Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers” (Oxford), by Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. Drawing on family papers and records of interviews conducted four decades ago for a biography that was never written, Misak tells a more colorful story than one might have thought possible so long after such a short life ended. (View Highlight)
At a time when few women went to university, Agnes Ramsey studied history at Oxford, and also attended the logic lectures of Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll). She had been among the little girls whom Dodgson liked to take boating. More progressive than her husband, Agnes was an activist for left-wing and feminist causes. Frank was similarly inclined; at school, he was seen as an “ardent Bolshevik.” At university, he became involved in local politics and was a keen, though undoctrinaire, member of the Socialist Society. (View Highlight)
The Ramseys were part of an intellectual aristocracy, in which Frank was comfortable from a young age. After his first meeting with Keynes, in Cambridge, Ramsey recorded that he found him “very pleasant”; on a walk, they had talked about the history of economics, the lamentable state of probability theory, and the difficulty of writing. Ramsey was seventeen at the time; Keynes was advising the League of Nations and the Bank of England, and lunching with Winston Churchill. (View Highlight)
In his final year of secondary school, Ramsey decided to focus on pure mathematics, which is what he would earn his degree in, teach, and use as a tool. But philosophy was always what gripped him most. At school, he had read Bertrand Russell’s “The Principles of Mathematics,” which argued for the “logicist” view that mathematical truths and concepts can be derived from logical ones. Much of Ramsey’s early technical work in philosophy built on Russell’s logicist ideas and sorted through their ramifications. For one thing, he improved a theory of Russell’s that had dealt with self-referential paradoxes. (One famous example concerns a barber who shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?) (View Highlight)
Ramsey was also an enthusiastic, though not uncritical, admirer of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus”—a book that Wittgenstein, who first arrived in Cambridge to work with Russell in 1911, completed seven years later, as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army interned in an Italian P.O.W. camp. The “Tractatus” argued that philosophical problems are the result of misunderstanding the logic of language. By revealing its real logic, Wittgenstein believed, he had solved them all. His account of logic enthralled Ramsey, who, in 1921, was recruited to translate the book into English. (View Highlight)
In 1926, Ramsey composed a long paper about truth and probability which looked at the effects of what he called “partial beliefs”—that is, of people’s judgments of probability. This may have been his most influential work. It ingeniously used the bets one would make in hypothetical situations to measure how firmly one believes a proposition and how much one wants something, and thus laid the foundations of what are now known as decision theory and the subjective theory of probability. (View Highlight)
Ramsey hoped to turn his essay about truth and probability into a book, which he worked on in the late twenties, but during this time he also produced two articles for The Economic Journal, which was edited by Keynes. One was the article on savings—Ramsey mentioned to Keynes that it was “much easier to concentrate on than philosophy”—and the other was about tax, and ultimately no less consequential. Its key proposal is that, given certain conditions, the rates of sales taxes should be set in such a way that the production of each taxed commodity falls by the same proportion. The tax article, like the savings one, eventually became the basis of a subfield of economics concerned with “optimal taxation,” and changed the way economists thought about public finance. (View Highlight)
Ramsey’s temperament could not have been more different. Keynes wrote that Ramsey’s common sense and practicality reminded him of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. And, like Hume, he was plump, jolly, and fond of cards. One member of the Bloomsbury set recounted a poker night with Ramsey: “Frank, with the guffaws of a hippopotamus and terrible mathematical calculations, got all our money from us.” (View Highlight)
