Success and future of demography: the role of data and methods

Demography typifies paradigmatic success; that is, cumulative scientific work that has provided useful perspectives on a set of important questions. This success can be traced partly to the core subject matter of demography, which is relatively conducive to quantitative, observational science. The development of demography was further aided by extrinsic factors, such as the import of its data for government administration, for business purposes, and the import of demographic questions for social problems and public policy. These observations make suspect any simple projection of demography's success into the future or the transport of its experience to other disciplines.