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 wrote a series of 15 papers in The Lancet, from 1836 to 1842, on the topic of mortality and health, the first being "On the laws of collective vitality".[5] It was to be a major influence in the field of
epidemiology, as developed by
William Farr.[6] While Edmonds and Farr both did pioneer work on
vital statistics, the starting point for Edmonds was the needs of
life insurance.[7] For Farr, there were applications to
mortality and
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]
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
Ricardian socialist,[15] though this is disputed by Thompson,[16] and an
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.
In Life Tables, founded upon the discovery of a numerical law regulating the existence of every human being (1832),[23] Edmonds claimed as a new discovery on the
mortality rate a model on ageing and mortality found in the 1820s by
Benjamin Gompertz. He promoted its application to
case fatality risk, to medical professionals.[24] He also remarked on many other related topics, such as maximum
birth rates and
gender mortality differentials.[25]
In his mortality theory, Edmonds took up observations of
Richard Price, dividing life into three periods (childhood, "manhood" from age 12 to 55, and old age). He quantified mortality by using different
geometric progressions in each period.[26] His table became known as "Edmonds's Mean Mortality".[27] He persisted into the 1860s with his piecewise approach, though by then with two periods, rather than the
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)[31] was anonymous at its publication.[32]Garrett Hardin regarded this book as the first important population theory opposed to that of
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
Richard Jones,
Augustus Henry Moreton and
George Rickards) laid weight on factors that could cause postponement of marriage.[34] In general he relied on "non-moral" effects, and Chapter VIII of the book addressed the possible effects on labourers' fertility of
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]
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
^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.
^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
^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