Demography’s Quest for Learning Truth from Facts
Demographers are far off at the inductive end of the social sciences. I like to think that what we do is close to the Chinese injunction “learn truth from facts.” My own career has been heavily focused on questions of health. Social scientists have made big contributions to this field by focusing on the health of populations, a broader canvas than one finds in schools of medicine or public health. My dissertation provided an abrupt introduction to public discourse. It described how cigarette smoking by men was distorting mortality patterns in 17 countries, using demographic…
Read More