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A Man Who Thought Too Fast (2020)

Frank Ramsey—a philosopher, economist, and mathematician—was one of the greatest minds of the last century. Have we caught up with him yet?

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. An obituary notice in the records of Magdalene College, where Arthur Ramsey was second-in-command for twenty-two years, described his rule as “austere.” In childhood, Frank’s way of dealing with his father’s foul moods was to slip calmly out of the room whenever the going got rough. Tall and increasingly round, he had a lumbering grace, and acquitted himself well at lawn tennis; a friend, writing in her diary, described a broad face that “always seems ready to break into a wide smile.” He fell in love with Lettice Baker, a spirited woman five years his senior, who had excelled in science and philosophy as a Cambridge undergraduate and was working at the university’s psychology laboratories.

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