Taking Stock of Population Studies: A Review Essay*

Abstract

The major disciplines in the social sciences, it is often observed, are both self-regarding and territorial. They need no assurance of place and worth (one of them with hubris enough to have devised for itself its own kind of Nobel prize); they are casually expansive when turf and opportunity allow. Demography is not in that league. A mere quasi-discipline by one account, theory-deprived by another, it fits uneasily among its larger neighbors?a status closely echoed in university structures, where, as rarely more than a center, it not untypically occupies a modest old house tucked away from the multistory offices of academic departments proper. And faced with existential challenges, it engages more than most in navel-gazing. Yet the study of population is no trivial pursuit. Demography offers ever more-refined efforts at assembling and measuring its materials, an elaborate accounting apparatus across age, place, and time, sophisticated mathematical models of population renewal and other dynamics, fruitful excursions into biology, economics, and sociology (but curiously, not much into geography, political science, or anthropology), and, fed with a welter of survey data, apparently endless opportunities for multivariate analysis of population-re lated behavior. Demography also allows for rich historical perspectives and cross-cultural comparisons; it touches the burgeoning fields of environmental science; and at numerous points it bears on significant issues of public policy. The field has its quirks too?not least of them a reductionist motivational calculus of wants, desires, and needs for demographic and health inputs or outcomes that has grown up in support of programmatic action. Trait? de d?mographie was the title of demography's first modern stocktak

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