29 - FRANK RAMSEY

Summary

RAMSEY AS AN ECONOMIST

The death at the age of twenty-six of Frank Ramsey, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, sometime scholar of Winchester and of Trinity, son of the President of Magdalene, was a heavy loss—though his primary interests were in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic—to the pure theory of Economics. From a very early age, about sixteen I think, his precocious mind was intensely interested in economic problems. Economists living in Cambridge have been accustomed from his undergraduate days to try their theories on the keen edge of his critical and logical faculties. If he had followed the easier path of mere inclination, I am not sure that he would not have exchanged the tormenting exercises of the foundations of thought and of psychology, where the mind tries to catch its own tail, for the delightful paths of our own most agreeable branch of the moral sciences, in which theory and fact, intuitive imagination and practical judgment, are blended in a manner comfortable to the human intellect.

When he did descend from his accustomed stony heights, he still lived without effort in a rarer atmosphere than most economists care to breathe, and handled the technical apparatus of our science with the easy grace of one accustomed to something far more difficult. But he has left behind him in print (apart from his philosophical papers) only two witnesses to his powers—his papers published in the Economic Journal on ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Taxation’ in March 1927, and on ‘A Mathematical Theory of Saving’ in December 1928.