Richard Price

Welsh dissenting minister, moral philosopher and mathematician (1723–1791), load-bearing in two lineages that are almost never told together — which is the reason this hub exists and the reason his name is ambiguous in the vault's own index.

In the history of insurance he produced the Northampton mortality table and Observations on Reversionary Payments (1771), the standard actuarial reference for roughly a century (claim-price-northampton-table-standard-actuarial-reference-century). The table was biased: it overestimated mortality, a direction good for insurers selling assurance and adverse to annuity buyers (claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers). Its position outlasted the first evidence capable of testing it — the Amicable Society's assured-lives experience of about 1811 came out more favourable, and a fuller analysis followed in 1841, yet Northampton remained standard.

In political philosophy he preached "A Discourse on the Love of Our Country" on 4 November 1789, provoking Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and touching off the Revolution Controversy (claim-price-1789-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections). observation-richard-price-anchors-actuarial-and-political-philosophy-lineages is the note that holds the two halves together.

References

• claim-price-northampton-table-standard-actuarial-reference-century
• claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers
• claim-price-1789-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections
• observation-richard-price-anchors-actuarial-and-political-philosophy-lineages
• claim-pensam-1811-amicable-experience-first-assured-lives-mortality-data
• observation-galloway-is-a-third-astronomer-actuary-instance — a third instance of the same one-person-two-lineages shape, in Thomas Galloway
• question-verify-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-primary — open
• question-verify-price-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections-primary — answered 2026-08-27
• moc-early-life-assurance-and-the-age-rating-lag
• claim-burke-attacks-price-by-page-cited-verbatim-quotation
• claim-burke-reading-printed-sermon-prompted-reflections
• claim-price-1789-discourse-celebrates-french-revolution-as-continuation-of-1688-and-america
• 2026-08-24: A third independent telling (Bernstein, Against the Gods, 1996, via a Goodreads transcription) corroborates the underestimation and complicates the annuity-side incidence — see claim-bernstein-1996-corroborates-price-table-underestimated-life-expectancy and the addendum on claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers. The Tier 1–2 primary most likely to settle the open question — William Sutton's 1874 paper — is now identified but access-blocked; see entity-william-sutton.
• 2026-08-27: The Burke/Price causal claim — previously resting only on Tier-4 Wikipedia — is now confirmed by a direct read of both primaries (Burke's Reflections, Price's Discourse 3rd ed.), with a documented nuance that a private letter to Depont pre-dates the sermon by about a month. entity-edmund-burke now has its own hub. See claim-price-1789-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections's Correction history and claim-burke-attacks-price-by-page-cited-verbatim-quotation.