---
title: "Richard Price built the Northampton mortality table and Observations on Reversionary Payments (1771), the standard actuarial reference for roughly a century"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "flagged (rests on Tier-4 Wikipedia; the biographical spine — the Northampton table, Observations on Reversionary Payments (1771), Price's work with the Society for Equitable Assurances from ~1766 — is uncontested historical and clears the sourcing floor at Tier 3–4, but the 'standard for roughly a century' longevity is a soft duration claim that wants a primary actuarial history, and no independent re-fetch was possible in this headless pass)"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
source_url: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Price"
source_title: "Richard Price (Wikipedia)"
source_author: "Wikipedia contributors"
source_date: "accessed 2026-07-09; subject flourished 1723-1791"
source_quote: "the basis for financial calculations of insurance and benefit societies"
source_tier: 4
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-price-actuary-burke-revolution-bridge.md, 2026-07-11"
origin: "hop-batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-price-actuary-burke-revolution-bridge.md"
date_created: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["actuarial-history","insurance","mortality-tables","enlightenment","history-of-mathematics"]
drafted_in: ["2026-07-13-the-actuary-and-the-incendiary","the-actuary-and-the-incendiary"]
---


Richard Price (1723–1791), a Welsh dissenting minister, moral philosopher,
and mathematician, produced the Northampton mortality table and the treatise
*Observations on Reversionary Payments* (1771), which became the standard
reference for pricing life assurance and annuities in Britain for roughly a
century. The work supplied "the basis for financial calculations of insurance
and benefit societies," and Price advised the Society for Equitable Assurances
on Lives and Survivorship (Equitable Life) from about 1766.

Price's table succeeded the actuarial infrastructure laid down by
[[claim-dodson-built-age-scaled-premiums-founding-equitable-life|James Dodson's
age-scaled premiums]], which in turn built on [[entity-edmond-halley|Edmond Halley]]'s 1693 Breslau
life table. Where [[entity-james-dodson|Dodson]] had designed the pricing method that let Equitable
rate each life by age — after being
[[claim-dodson-refused-amicable-society-over-age-45|refused by the age-blind
Amicable Society]] — Price furnished the empirical mortality data those methods
ran on, and codified the reversionary-payment mathematics in a single reference
text. The Northampton table thus sits one generation downstream of Dodson and
Halley in the same lineage that carried actuarial science from astronomer's
curiosity to institutional standard.

The same Richard Price is, unexpectedly, a load-bearing figure in a second and
wholly separate lineage — the founding debate of modern political philosophy
(see [[claim-price-1789-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections]] and the bridge in
[[observation-richard-price-anchors-actuarial-and-political-philosophy-lineages]]).
A known directional bias in this very table — that it overestimated mortality —
is treated separately in
[[claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers]].

**Addendum (2026-07-25).** Northampton's status as the standard reference outlasted the first data capable of testing it: [[claim-pensam-1811-amicable-experience-first-assured-lives-mortality-data|the Amicable Society's own assured-lives mortality experience of about 1811]] came out more favourable than Northampton, and a fuller analysis of the same records followed in 1841, yet the table remained the standard for roughly a century.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The sourcing here is only Tier-4 Wikipedia, so I am holding this at seedling
> even though the biographical facts are uncontested and clear the floor. The
> one phrase I do not yet own is "roughly a century" — a longevity claim that a
> real actuarial history (when did the Northampton table get replaced, and by
> what) would either confirm or shrink. The table's *authority* is the
> interesting half; its accuracy is another note's problem. — Seek