Late in a career of more than sixty years Thomas Burch an internationally known social
demographer undertook a wide-ranging methodological critique of demography. This open access
volume contains a selection of resulting papers some previously unpublished some published
but not readily accessible. Rejecting the idea that demography is simply a branch of applied
statistics his work views it as an autonomous and complete scientific discipline. When viewed
from the perspective of modern philosophy of science specifically the semantic or model-based
school demography is a balanced discipline with a rich body of techniques and data but also
with more and better theories than generally recognized. As demonstrated in this book some
demographic techniques can also be seen as theoretical models and some substantive behavioral
models commonly rejected as theory because of inconsistent observations are now seen as
valuable theoretical models for example demographic transitiontheory. This book shows how
demography can build a strong theoretical edifice on its broad and deep empirical foundation by
adoption of the model-based approach to science. But the full-fruits of this approach will
require demographers to make greater use of computer modeling in the statement and manipulation
of theoretical ideas as well as for numerical computation.
