Richard Price liked to champion human rights and challenge the status quo. A philosopher with a flair for figures, he is considered by many to be the very first actuary. Kenneth Bogle outlines why, after 300 years, his legacy lives on
In February, outside a red-bricked terraced house on Newington Green in north London, BBC television presenter Huw Edwards unveiled a new English Heritage blue memorial plaque. It was dedicated to Dr Richard Price, a remarkable Welsh mathematician who had lived there and who, among a host of achievements, helped to shape the early development of actuarial science and the profession. On the tricentenary of his birth, we tell his story.
Price was an author, moral philosopher, nonconformist minister, political commentator, demographer and all-round polymath – a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy and boundless intellect and curiosity.
Born in a farmhouse in the village of Llangeinor, Wales on 23 February 1723, he was educated privately before moving to London, where he remained for the rest of his life. He became minister to the Newington Green Meeting House, a group that continues today as Newington Green Unitarian Church, New Unity. Price also moved among the intellectual circles of his time and corresponded with many important thinkers, including some of the American Revolution’s founding figures. His ideas on liberty are thought to have played a significant role in influencing the Americans to declare independence.
Among several political causes and campaigns, Price was an early supporter of human rights and equality. He defended the ideals of the French Revolution and recognised women’s important role in society. Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist and writer, attended his congregation in Newington Green.
Price’s radical views did not make him popular with some of his contemporaries and he was pilloried by conservative writers such as Edmund Burke. Today, he is recognised as a figure of global importance whose ideas on society, politics and government are still relevant and widely debated.
Brotherhood with Bayes
Price wrote on many religious, moral and philosophical issues but was best known for his work on financial and political questions. Among these was a controversial pamphlet on public finance written in the early 1770s, which is said to have influenced the then prime minister William Pitt the Younger to re-establish a sinking fund for the elimination of the national debt.
A decade earlier, in the 1760s, Price had been the literary executor of statistician and philosopher Thomas Bayes (c.1701–61). Price edited Bayes’s major work ‘An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances’ (1763), which contained Bayes’ theorem, one of the fundamental results of probability theory. In an introduction to the paper, Price provided some of the philosophical basis of Bayesian statistics. In 1765, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of his work on Bayes’s legacy.
The life and work of Richard Price is well represented in the collections of the IFoA Library, which holds original editions of his pioneering work Observations on Reversionary Payments, published in 1771. This book is considered an early classic of actuarial science, providing the basis for the financial calculations of insurance and benefit societies. The fourth edition of 1783 includes Price’s celebrated ‘Northampton table’, a life table using data from Northampton, which became an actuarial standard for more than a century.
His ideas on liberty are thought to have played a role in influencing American independence
Price was a prolific letter writer and the IFoA Library holds an original letter from 1773, as well as a unique manuscript copy of his groundbreaking 1774 paper ‘Observations on the Proper Method of Keeping the Accounts, and Determining from Year to Year the State of the Society for Equitable Assurances on Lives & Survivorships’. This was presented to the directors of the Society for Equitable Assurances in January 1775 and developed pioneering actuarial methods for carrying out periodic investigations into the society’s financial state – until then, nobody knew if it was making any money or not. Price’s nephew, William Morgan, was an actuary and became manager of the Equitable in 1775, largely thanks to Price’s influence. Morgan later wrote a biography of his uncle. The IFoA Library also holds several modern biographies of Price.
In A History of British Actuarial Thought, published in 2017, Craig Turnbull concludes: “Richard Price stands as a titan of actuarial thought. If an actuary is someone who provides rational and rigorous advice on the sustainable long-term financial management of life contingencies business, then Price was arguably the first actuary, and inarguably one of the most important and influential actuaries in the profession’s history.”
The man behind the maths
In June 1757, Price married Sarah Blundell, from Leicestershire. Family legend has it that he was a warm and generous man with a great sense of fun: he once challenged another man to a hopping race across a field near his home, which he won amid great cheering. Price died on 17 April 1791 and was buried in Bunhill Fields in the City of London, where his tomb can still be visited.
The memorial plaque was unveiled on 23 February, the day before the 300th anniversary of Price’s birth, and is located at 54 (originally 43) Newington Green, London, where he lived from 1758 to 1787. Interestingly, his home at Newington Green is a fascinating piece of history in its own right – dating from 1658, it is part of what is considered London’s oldest surviving row of terraced houses.
IFoA immediate past president Louise Pryor, IFoA librarian David Raymont and descendants of Price attended the ceremony. The latter included Nicola Bruton Bennetts, biographer of Price’s nephew William Morgan.
Following the ceremony, Pryor said: “It was an honour to be here today to see the unveiling of the plaque dedicated to this extraordinary polymath of a man. Richard Price would have been remarkable even without his interest and ability in actuarial science, but to have that alongside his other talents demonstrates just what an exceptional and outstanding man he was. He deserves to be remembered and memorialised.”
Dr Kenneth Bogle is knowledge and publications assistant at the IFoA Library in Edinburgh
Image credit | Alamy
