Cheryl Misak’s biography Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is terrific. It’s the first full biography of the lost genius of economics, philosophy and maths – he died at the age of just 26 having already made fundamental contributions in each field, each of which has its Ramsey rule or principle. There’s also the ‘Ramsey effect’ of having a brilliant idea only to discover that Frank Ramsey had it first. There is an earlier biography of him by Karl Sabbagh, Shooting Star, which is also well worth a read but it doesn’t have the scale or ambition of this new one.

Misak takes us to the intellectual environment of the 1920s, Moore and also Russell ascendant in Cambridge philosophy, Keynes in economics, logical positivism and the Vienna circle getting into gear. The personal story – growing up in Cambridge as one of four children of a not particularly inspired and narrowly religious mathematics don – is threaded alongside the intellectual journey. Ramsey was sent to Winchester, which sounds hellish, then did the maths Tripos at Trinity College – his entire life centred on Cambridge.

As a teenage undergraduate student he was identified as the right person to translate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – the only person who might understand it. Wittgenstein – what an absolutely dreadful man. I for one have also always found both early and late Wittgenstein totally unintelligible, although accepting there does seem to be a consensus that he was a genius. Ramsey seems to have thought so, while disagreeing with key arguments in the Tractatus; they continued their conversation until Ramsey’s death, albeit with Wittgenstein having a big sulk of several years in the middle, refusing to correspond with him.

Anyway, on graduation Ramsey was snapped up by Kings as a Fellow (at 21), and embarked on foundational work in mathematics with massively influential sidelines in Philosophy and economics. (The biography has useful boxes written by distinguished scholars explaining Ramsey’s main contributions in each field.) Economists such as Keynes and Pigou used him to check their maths, and he also reviewed submissions to the Economic Journal for Keynes. Sraffa was a friend. There are intriguing signs in his last paper that Ramsey would have taken forward the pragmatism of C.S.Peirce (another pretty unintelligible writer – or maybe it’s me and philosophy…). Who knows what other contributions he would have made in economics.

But Ramsey was no narrow, dull academic. He socialised with the Bloomsbury set, advocated free love, went to Vienna to be psychoanalysed, joined societies, played tennis, and like everyone at the time wrote countless letters – Misak has clearly spent vast amounts of itme in the archives.

A sheer excess of powers. A shooting star. Both seem apt descriptions. In just a few years he had published a dozen or so transformational papers spanning three fields. It must be Ramsey’s tragic early death that explains why he isn’t more widely known. This biography is my book of the year so far.

I was very pleased to receive in the post a copy of Andrew Whitby’s book The Sum of The People: How the Census has Shaped Nations, which I read in a proof copy and wrote one of the back cover blurbs for. I am perhaps peculiarly interested in statistics and the story of statistics, but this book is genuinely a page-turner from the first page of the Preface on.

It’s a broadly chronological account of the history of censuses from the dawn of recorded history (China’s Yellow River region, ancient Mesopotamia) to the present day. It weaves into that the history of technologies for counting people, including for example the story of the BBC’s 1986 900th anniversary version of the Domesday Book – on an aluminium laser disc. As the book points out, the vellum of the original has had greater longevity and it has been digitised.  And of course demographic trends feature too, for example in the ‘population time bomb’ debate of the late 60s and 70s.

Of course, the most interesting aspect is why the cenus matters, which is its relationship with power and money. They are always either political or politiczed. One vivid illustration is the Allied attack on the Dutch population registry in early 1944, which killed around 60 civilians working there but destroyed one in four of the records so a quarter of the identity cards the occupiers asked for unable to be verified. Too late for Dutch Jews, of whom 73% had already been murdered, but very helpful to the Dutch Resistance as the war drew toward its end.

The book ends by observing that the current censuses in and around 2020 – US, UK, China and elsewhere – my well be among the last of the traditional kind where enumerators try to get a response from everyone. The use of administrative records is likely to take over in future. Cost is a major reason, as is evidence of systematic undercounting in some countries. But I must say, the idea of being reliant on big data stored in centralised population registries leaves me a bit uneasy: is this the ideal way of capturing the relationship between individual and state? As the book puts it, “In a time when so much information collection is covert and passive, the census is the opposite: it demands our active attention.” Another human will ring the doorbell. It’s a shame this will surely pass into history.