Are there principles of demography? A search for unifying (and hegemonic) themes

Abstract

The principles underlying a field of study can provide both internal coherence and external influence. First, in our context of a scientific discipline, principles can lend coherence by explicating how the discipline’s various aspects and pieces fit together, and how their total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Second, a discipline’s principles can suggest how its perspectives and findings might contribute to other disciplines, and, even more broadly, to policy analysis and civil discourse. The exporting of hegemony across scientific fields and beyond—a process that can be more aggressive and less friendly than the usual multidisciplinary pursuits—can awaken new passions in adjacent academic fields. If there are principles of demography that already reflect and provide coherence within our field, is it then possible that the explicit elucidation or even the promotion of these principles abroad adds to the prominence of our science in the academic and policy communities, while enriching other approaches to studying human behavior? Anthropology, economics, geography, psychology, and sociology might be open to the hegemony of demographic perspectives, models, and tools, as unified under a set of principles. The philosophy and methodology of science, in which my topic modestly sits, has interested Wolfgang Lutz throughout his career. Drawing on his strong academic grounding in history and philosophy, he has recently made the fruitful proposal of partitioning scientific disciplines into identity sciences and intervention sciences, and causality into strong causality and functional causality (Lutz et al. 2017, 17– 19). The identity sciences, which are generally the humanities, ask “Who are we?” and “Where do we come from?” The intervention sciences ask “How do the most important forces of change in a social system function, so as to predict the future evolution of the system?”