Thomas Rowe Edmonds

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Thomas Rowe Edmonds (1803–1889) was an English actuary and political economist.

Life

He was born in Penzance in Cornwall on 20 June 1803, the son of Richard Edmonds who was town clerk of Marazion, and his wife Elizabeth.[1] Richard Edmonds was a younger brother.[2]

Edmonds attended

Legal and General Life Assurance Society from 1832 to 1866.[3]

Edmonds died in Maida Vale on 6 March 1889.[1]

Actuary and statistician

Edmonds applied the method of

Statistical Society in 1836.[1]

Edmonds wrote a series of 15 papers in

morbidity.[8] It was from the first paper of the Lancet series that Farr acquired a number of central points that Edmonds was making, in particular about collection of data.[9] Edmonds took to campaigning journalism. In The Lancet, and other periodicals edited by Farr and Thomas Wakley, he wrote polemically, in particular against the officials John Rickman and John Finlaison.[7]

Female mortality life tables compared, from an 1852 paper by Thomas Rowe Edmonds

Two committees of the Statistical Society involved Edmonds. In 1838 he was the leader of a group of six fellows asking for a committee to work on vital statistics. The plan was to circulate insurance offices with a request for information. The matter was taken up by Benjamin Gompertz in correspondence with Charles Babbage. In the end an external group of actuaries was consulted.[10] In 1841 Farr pressed for a committee to collect vital statistics from patients at London hospitals. A distinguished group came together, and two reports were produced.[11][12]

In 1852 Edmonds gave evidence to a House of Commons committee on income and property tax.[13] The following year he gave evidence to a committee chaired by James Wilson, on the Legal and General's business practices, and assurance associations in general.[14]

Socialist

Edmonds is considered a

Owenite.[17] He has also been called a "co-operative socialist".[18] He anticipated Karl Marx in a theory of surplus labour and wages, and in postulating the replacement of capitalism by a later stage, which he called the "social system".[19]

Works

Edmonds wrote three books in the period 1828 to 1832.

Practical Moral and Political Economy (1828)

This work is considered, by

social Darwinist. His analysis of pauperism was inconsistent, but he could attribute it to the effects of private property.[21] F. J. C. Hearnshaw considered that the book foreshadowed Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics.[22]

Life Tables (1832)

In Life Tables, founded upon the discovery of a numerical law regulating the existence of every human being (1832),

gender mortality differentials.[25]

In his mortality theory, Edmonds took up observations of

sigmoid curve model of Gompertz.[28] But Edmonds came in for some rough handling for his continuing assertions of the independence of his model from that of Gompertz. Augustus De Morgan and Thomas Bond Sprague took him to task during the early 1860s, in the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries.[29] This controversy was later thought to have slowed acceptance of the refinement proposed by William Makeham to the Gompertz model, now the Gompertz–Makeham law of mortality.[30]

An Enquiry into the Principles of Population (1832)

An Enquiry into the Principles of Population, Exhibiting a System of Regulations for the Poor (1832)

Robert Malthus.[33] It contains an analysis of famine, as caused by export of food, with remarks on the Irish situation.[18]

In arguing against Malthus, Edmonds (in common with

upward mobility.[35] Edmonds attributed some contemporary social problems to the small extent of the middle class.[36] He rejected "Sadler's law" put forth by Michael Thomas Sadler two years earlier, to the effect that higher population density led to lower fertility, on the basis of empirical work in some urban areas. Later research by David Heron confirmed Edmonds's findings, which left open the question of urban versus rural fertility.[37]

Family

Edmonds married Elizabeth Elspith Ruddack in 1833. They had a son, Frederic Bernard.[1]

References

  • David Edward Charles Eversley (1975). Social Theories of Fertility and the Malthusian Debate. Greenwood Press.
    ISBN 978-0-8371-7628-4
    . Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  • Michael Perelman, Edmonds, Ricardo, and What Might Have Been, Science & Society Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring, 1980), pp. 82–85. Published by: Guilford Press. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40402220

Notes

  1. ^
    doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/40991. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  2. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8487. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  3. ^ "Edmonds, Thomas Rowe (EDMS822TR)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  4. ISBN 978-0-387-95329-8
    . Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  5. ISBN 978-0-521-78254-8
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  6. ^ http://www.epidemiology.ch/history/papers/SPM%2047(1)%206-13%20Eyler-2.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-3-7643-6818-0
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  8. ISBN 978-0-521-55699-6
    . Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  9. ISBN 978-0-8223-8852-4
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  10. ^ Michael J. Cullen (1975). The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain. Harvester Press. p. 96.
  11. Alexander Murray Tulloch
    .
  12. ^ Michael J. Cullen (1975). The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain. Harvester Press. p. 98.
  13. ^ The Medical Times and Gazette. J. & A. Churchill. 1852. p. 468. Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  14. ^ Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons (1853). Reports from Committees. Ordered to be printed. pp. 121–40. Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  15. ^ Perelman, p. 82.
  16. ISBN 978-0-521-89342-8
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  17. ISBN 978-0-521-55699-6
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  18. ^
    ISBN 978-90-04-20247-4
    . Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  19. ISBN 978-3-7643-6818-0
    . Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  20. ISBN 978-0-521-04393-9
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  21. ISBN 978-0-521-57434-1
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  22. ^ F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Social & political ideas of some representative thinkers of the Victorian Age: a series of lectures delivered at King's College, University of London, during the session 1931–32 (1950), p. 264; archive.org.
  23. ^ Thomas Rowe Edmonds (1832). Life tables, founded upon the discovery of a numerical law regulating the existence of every human being. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  24. ^ Robert Lee, Early Death and Long Life in History: Establishing the Scale of Premature Death in Europe and its Cultural, Economic and Social Significance Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung Vol. 34, No. 4 (130), Premature Death: Patterns of Identity and Meaning From a Historical Perspective / Vorzeitiger Tod: Identitäts- und Sinnstiftung in historischer Perspektive (2009), pp. 23–60, at p. 28. Published by: GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Center for Historical Social Research. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20762397
  25. ISBN 978-0-521-78254-8
    . Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  26. ^ John Bell (1842). On Regimen and Longevity: Comprising Materia Alimentaria, National Dietetic Usages, and the Influence of Civilization on Health and the Duration of Life. Haswell & Johnson. p. 395. Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  27. ^ Institute of Actuaries (Great Britain) (1869). Journal of the Institute of Actuaries. p. 251. Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  28. ^ Institute of Actuaries (Great Britain) (1867). The Assurance Magazine, and Journal of the Institute of Actuaries. C. & E. Layton. p. 15 note. Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  29. ISBN 978-1-85196-161-0
    . Retrieved 12 June 2013.
  30. ^ R., The late William Matthew Makeham, Journal of the Institute of Actuaries (1886–1994) Vol. 30, No. 1 (April 1892), pp. 1–8 at p. 4. Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41136002
  31. ^ Thomas Rowe Edmonds (1832). An enquiry into the principles of population, exhibiting a system of regulations for the poor ... J. Duncan. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  32. ^ Eversley, p. 43.
  33. ISBN 978-0-19-802403-3
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  34. ^ Eversley, p. 257.
  35. ^ Eversley, p. 74 and p. 108.
  36. ISBN 978-0-521-47710-9
    . Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  37. ^ Eversley, pp. 43–4.
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