Crossing the Atlantic
In mathematics, some of Ramsey’s contributions were acknowledged promptly by Paul Erdos and George Szekeres (Graham and Spencer 1990: 114-115), leading to the creation of a field in the intersecting areas of combinatorics, number theory, geometry, topology, and measure theory, known as ‘Ramsey theory’ (mathematicians also talk about ‘Ramsey numbers’; cf. Soifer 2009, 2011). In contrast, as I mentioned earlier, in economics, Ramsey is presented as a sleeping giant who was awaken only in the 1950s when economists finally acquired the necessary mathematical tools to comprehend his ideas—a process that was an integral part of the Americanization and dominance of neoclassicism in economics (Morgan and Rutherford 1998). Claims like this tend to miss important aspects of the canonization of authors in a given community.
Ramsey’s 1927 and 1928 articles were discussed before the 1950s to a limited extent when compared to the boom in citations that occurred from the mid-1950s onwards (Duarte 2009b, 2010). The ‘rediscovery’ of Ramsey meant extending his analyses, with new mathematical tools, such as Hamiltonians or new theories of welfare economics, and placing them at the core of the neoclassical economics of the post-war period. This is exactly what Michael Intriligator’s description in the late 1960s of optimal growth literature reveals: this literature ‘carries the imprint: “Economics by Ramsey; Mathematics by Pontryagin” (Intriligator quoted in Duarte 2009b: 173).
In order to better understand the canonization of Ramsey in post-war economics, we have to recognize that, in terms of citations to him in economics articles available on JSTOR, there were three major waves of ‘rediscoveries’ (Duarte 2009b: 168-189): a wave of references to Ramsey in the subjective probability and expected utility literature of the 1950s and early 1960s; another wave on economic growth starting in the mid-1950s; and a final wave from the late 1960s on public economics. Furthermore, Paul Samuelson was a leading author citing Ramsey in all of them and an influential teacher of several authors who later contributed either to the optimal growth literature or to the public finance discussion on taxation, or to both (such as Peter Diamond and Joseph Stiglitz). Samuelson feared dying early and loved telling his students stories about economists, particularly the one, as already noted, that Ramsey learned German in a week, promoting the romantic view of the precocious mathematician who made seminal contributions and died in the prime of life (Duarte 2010: 150-153).
For post-war economists, several of whom were connected to Cambridge, USA, Ramsey is the precursor of a microfounded model of growth in which the lifetime utility of a representative agent is discounted. In public finance, he is also the precursor of a representative agent theory that was unfortunately in the mould of the old welfare economics with interpersonal comparison of utilities.[1] Clearly, the mathematical tool used by Ramsey (1928), namely the calculus of variations, was not the major factor explaining its attractiveness to post-war economists: the American mathematicians Griffith Evans and Charles Roos were contemporaries of Ramsey who employed the same method, albeit not in a utilitarian framework, and who were marginalized in post-war economics (Weintraub 2002: Chapter 2). The growing importance of Ramsey has much to do with the communities of economists who transformed economics in the post-war period.
- [1] It is unclear whether Ramsey had a notion of a representative agent. I argue that he might have had one(Duarte 2010: 126-130).
