pandas read_json: “If using all scalar values, you must pass an index”

Try

ser = pd.read_json('people_wiki_map_index_to_word.json', typ='series')

That file only contains key value pairs where values are scalars. You can convert it to a dataframe with ser.to_frame('count').

You can also do something like this:

import json
with open('people_wiki_map_index_to_word.json', 'r') as f:
    data = json.load(f)

Now data is a dictionary. You can pass it to a dataframe constructor like this:

df = pd.DataFrame({'count': data})