There is little doubt that John Maynard Keynes fundamentally shaped economics and policymaking in the twentieth century. Less appreciated is that he owes some of his central insights to a brilliant Cambridge polymath who died in 1930 at age 26.

CAMBRIDGE – In January 1922, a 19-year-old University of Cambridge undergraduate challenged a recently published work of philosophy by a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, a man twice his age and well on his way to recognition as Britain’s leading public intellectual.

In the uninhibited style that is so characteristic of Cambridge argumentation, Frank Ramsey laid into John Maynard Keynes’s Treatise on Probability, which had proposed that there exists an objective probability relation between any two non-contradictory statements. Keynes had conferred on probabilities a status independent of anyone’s beliefs about the likelihood that the second statement would follow from the first. But Ramsey objected that, “There is no such probability as the probability that ‘my carpet is blue’ given only that ‘Napoleon was a great general.’”

Want to know more? Read Dr. Bill Janeway's essay.

Note - Originally published on Project Syndicate on 7th August 2020