Demography, as once advertised on the cover of this journal, is “the statistical study of human populations.” In the long history of the discipline, tracing back perhaps to John Graunt’s primitive construction of the life table in 1662 (Smith and Keyfitz 2013/1977), the statistical study of human beings has expanded well beyond earlier interests, which were mostly concerned with relationships between vital rates and population size and composition. While many researchers still distinguish between demography and population studies, Demography, as the flagship journal of the Population Association of America (PAA), now encompasses scholars from anthropology, economics, geography, political science, public health, sociology, and many other fields. Demographic processes and outcomes are seen as among the best measures to understand human societies and changes. Practitioners in the field now study social phenomena ranging from health to wealth, from inequality to animosity, using a demographic perspective to examine the connections...

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