Ronald D Lee
Biographic Data
| ID | 752272 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ronald D Lee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ronald D |
| FAMILY NAME | Lee |
| SIGNATURE | LEE R D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9755-0436 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 813 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Forecasting Population in an Uncertain World: Approaches, New Uses, and Troubling Limitations
The long human lifespan enables long run forecasts of population size and age distribution. New methods include biodemographic research on upper limits to life expectancy and incorporation of early experiences affecting later life mortality such as smoking, obesity, and childhood health shocks. Some fertility forecasts incorporate education and quantum-tempo insights. Statistical time series and Bayesian methods generate probabilistic forecasts. …
Life Expectancy Reversals in Low-Mortality Populations
Behind the steady march of progress toward longer life expectancy in many low-mortality countries, there have been setbacks even before the Covid-19 pandemic. In this paper, we use an exploratory approach to describe the temporal structure, age patterns, and geographic aspects of life expectancy reversals. We find that drops in life expectancy are often followed by larger than average improvements, which tells us that most reversals are transitor…
Data-driven contact network models of Covid-19 reveal trade-offs between costs and infections for optimal local containment policies
Generational Wealth Accounts: Did Public and Private Inter-Generational Transfers Offset Each Other over the Financial Crisis
We develop Generational Wealth Accounts (GWA): the first set of balance sheets, by generations, to include all human capital, tangible wealth, financial wealth, and transfer wealth, and the uses to which these are put, and employ them to quantify inter-generational transfers and the sustainability of consumption. Consumption plans in the UK public sector worsened over the financial crisis and are unsustainable; private sector plans improved, and …
Six Ways Population Change Will Affect the Global Economy
New estimates of economic flows by age combined with population projections show that in the coming decades (1) global GDP growth could be slower by about 1 percentage point per year, declining more sharply than population growth; (2) GDP will shift toward sub-Saharan Africa more than population trends suggest; (3) living standards of working-age adults may be squeezed by high spending on children and seniors; (4) changing population age distribu…
Full Generational Accounts: What Do We Give to the Next Generation
What do we give to the next generation?Do we transfer wealth and human capital to our children, or do we saddle them with debt and obligations to support us in our old age?Standard Generational Accounts (GA) calculate the net present value of public sector taxes and benefits.Full Generational Accounts (FGA) add to this the present value of expected private transfers received over a lifetime, including parental costs of childrearing, bequests, and…
Does Fertility or Mortality Drive Contemporary Population Aging? The Revisionist View Revisited
Why are contemporary populations still aging?In the Classic view population aging has been driven almost entirely by fertility decline over the demographic transition, while mortality decline has played a minor role.In this view, populations today are still aging because they are still converging toward the new older stable age distribution.But in the past 25 years an elegant mathematical decomposition of changing mean ages has sometimes been int…
The Color of Smoke
epic Beowulf the monstrous emblem of strength ungoverned by wisdom. While John Gardner reimagines this monster as a modern antihero, Kingsnorth’s Buccmaster is in the end more like the medieval ghoul, a primitive, malignant sociopath. A remarkable feature of this novel is that it is written in what Kingsnorth calls a “shadow language” vaguely reminiscent of Old English, a Germanic dialect akin to modern Dutch. This contrivance creates the feel of…
Is low fertility really a problem? Population aging, dependency, and consumption
Longer lives and fertility far below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman are leading to rapid population aging in many countries. Many observers are concerned that aging will adversely affect public finances and standards of living. Analysis of newly available National Transfer Accounts data for 40 countries shows that fertility well above replacement would typically be most beneficial for government budgets. However, fertility near rep…
Extending the Lee-Carter Method to Model the Rotation of Age Patterns of Mortality Decline for Long-Term Projections
In developed countries, mortality decline is decelerating at younger ages and accelerating at old ages, a phenomenon we call “rotation.” We expect that this rotation will also occur in developing countries as they attain high life expectancies. But the rotation is subtle and has proved difficult to handle in mortality models that include all age groups. Without taking it into account, however, long-term mortality projections will produce question…
Intergenerational Transfers, the Biological Life Cycle, and Human Society
Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective
Generational Economics in a Changing World
v i e w 3 7 ( S u P P l e m e
Introduction: The Landscape of Demographic Transition and Its Aftermath
Fiscal Externalities of Becoming a Parent
Theoretical and empirical results suggest that there are externalities to childbearing, but those results usually assume that these externalities accrue uniformly within a homogeneous population. We advance this argument by developing separate estimates of the fiscal externalities associated with parents-those who devote time or material resources to minor children-and nonparents. Our analysis uses data from the US Panel Study of income Dynamics …
Fertility, Human Capital, and Economic Growth over the Demographic Transition
Do low fertility and population aging lead to economic decline if couples have fewer children, but invest more in each child? By addressing this question, this article extends previous work in which the authors show that population aging leads to an increased demand for wealth that can, under some conditions, lead to increased capital per worker and higher per capita consumption. This article is based on an overlapping generations (OLG) model whi…
Some macroeconomic aspects of global population aging
Across the demographic transition, declining mortality followed by declining fertility produces decades of rising support ratios as child dependency falls. These improving support ratios raise per capita consumption, other things equal, but eventually deteriorate as the population ages. Population aging and the forces leading to it can produce not only frightening declines in support ratios but also very substantial increases in productivity and …
Population dynamics: Social security, markets, and families
Upward intergenerational flows - from the working ages to old age - are increasing substantially in the advanced industrialized countries and are much larger than in developing countries. Population aging is the most important factor leading to this change. Thus, in the absence of a major demographic shift, e.g., a return to high fertility, an increase in upward flows is inevitable. Even so, three other important factors will influence the magnit…
Who Wins and Who Loses? Public Transfer Accounts for US Generations Born 1850 to 2090
Public transfer programs in industrial countries are thought to benefit the elderly through pension and health care programs at the expense of the young and future generations. This intergenerational picture changes, however, if public education is also considered as a transfer program. We calculate the net present value at birth of benefits received minus taxes paid for US generations born 1850 to 2090. Surprisingly, all generations 1950 to 2050…
Counting women's labour: A reanalysis of children's net production using Cain's data from a Bangladeshi village
The economic contribution of children to their parents' households has long interested demographers because of its potential to influence fertility levels. Valuing children's labour in pre-industrial economies, however, is inherently difficult. The same is true of women's labour, a crucial component of any analysis of net production. Here we use Mead Cain's seminal study (Population and Development Review 3(3): 201-227, 1977) of children's econom…
Coherent mortality forecasts for a group of populations: An extension of the lee-carter method
Mortality patterns and trajectories in closely related populations are likely to be similar in some respects, and differences are unlikely to increase in the long run. It should therefore be possible to improve the mortality forecasts for individual countries by taking into account the patterns in a larger group. Using the Human Mortality Database, we apply the Lee-Carter model to a group of populations, allowing each its own age pattern and leve…
Overlapping generations models with realistic demography
Rising longevity, education, savings, and growth
The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change
The global demographic transition began around 1800 in Europe with declining mortality followed by declining fertility, trends which spread around the world and continue in this century. At the aggregate level, population size greatly increased, growth accelerated and declined with many countries now shrinking, and age distributions inevitably moved from young to old. Population aging has not yet run its course, Its effects exacerbated by declini…
Malthus in state space: Macro economic-demographic relations in English history, 1540 to 1870
The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change
The global demographic transition began around 1800 in Europe with declining mortality followed by declining fertility, trends which spread around the world and continue in this century. At the aggregate level, population size greatly increased, growth accelerated and declined with many countries now shrinking, and age distributions inevitably moved from young to old. Population aging has not yet run its course, Its effects exacerbated by declini…
Population dynamics of humans and other animals
Human population dynamics, at least until the past century, have probably been governed by homeostasis and in this resembled those of other animals. Because human population homeostasis was probably substantially weaker than among large mammals, its operation has been less obvious. Nonetheless, the empirical evidence for advanced agriculturalists is compelling. Unlike animals, the human population has tended toward equilibria that have been tendi…
Coherent mortality forecasts for a group of populations: An extension of the lee-carter method
Mortality patterns and trajectories in closely related populations are likely to be similar in some respects, and differences are unlikely to increase in the long run. It should therefore be possible to improve the mortality forecasts for individual countries by taking into account the patterns in a larger group. Using the Human Mortality Database, we apply the Lee-Carter model to a group of populations, allowing each its own age pattern and leve…
Evaluating the performance of the lee-carter method for forecasting mortality
Lee and Carter (LC) published a new statistical method for forecasting mortality in 1992. This paper examines its actual and hypothetical forecast errors, and compares them with Social Security forecast errors. Hypothetical historical projections suggest that LC tended to underproject gains, but by less than did Social Security. True e0 was within the ex ante 95% probability interval 97% of the time overall, but intervals were too broad up to 40 …
Children's Economic Roles in the Maya Family Life Cycle: Cain, Caldwell, and Chayanov Revisited
This article examines the relationship between household demographic pressure and interage transfers for a group of Maya subsistence agriculturists in Yucatán, Mexico. The authors use data from a field study conducted in 1992-93 on individual time allocation, relative productivity by age and sex, and caloric costs of activities to estimate age schedules of average consumption and production. Using these, they investigate the net costs of children…
Fertility, Human Capital, and Economic Growth over the Demographic Transition
Do low fertility and population aging lead to economic decline if couples have fewer children, but invest more in each child? By addressing this question, this article extends previous work in which the authors show that population aging leads to an increased demand for wealth that can, under some conditions, lead to increased capital per worker and higher per capita consumption. This article is based on an overlapping generations (OLG) model whi…
Fertility Decline in Prussia, 1875-1910: A Pooled Cross-Section Time Series Analysis
Marital fertility level and decline are examined in 407 small areas in Prussia using quinquennial data for the period 1875 to 1910 from an unusually rich and detailed data set, and pooled cross-section time-series methods. Religion, ethnicity, and prevalence of mineworkers are the only statistically significant factors associated with marital fertility level. However, none of these are important predictors of marital fertility decline. Marital fe…
Aiming at a moving target: Period fertility and changing reproductive goals
Common sense suggests that changes over time in aggregate period fertility rates should be closely, related to changes in desired completed fertility after controlling for contraceptive failure, and desired spacing and timing; the nature of the relationship is, however, far from clear. This paper shows that when desired completed fertility undergoes swings, like those in the United States in recent decades, the turning points in period fertility …
Malthus in state space: Macro economic-demographic relations in English history, 1540 to 1870
Generational Economics in a Changing World
v i e w 3 7 ( S u P P l e m e
Getting down to the meat: The symbolic construction of meat consumption
This essay examines the symbolic construction of meat consumption in U. S. culture. Commodity fetishism in marketplace exchange removes the production process from the meaning of meat and, thereby, silences the slaughter of animals. Through the critical employment of a Burkean associational analysis and the identification of symbolic alignments, this essay traces the rhetorical transformation of a live animal into a consumer product. In so doing,…
Extending the Lee-Carter Method to Model the Rotation of Age Patterns of Mortality Decline for Long-Term Projections
In developed countries, mortality decline is decelerating at younger ages and accelerating at old ages, a phenomenon we call “rotation.” We expect that this rotation will also occur in developing countries as they attain high life expectancies. But the rotation is subtle and has proved difficult to handle in mortality models that include all age groups. Without taking it into account, however, long-term mortality projections will produce question…
Introduction: The Landscape of Demographic Transition and Its Aftermath
Does Fertility or Mortality Drive Contemporary Population Aging? The Revisionist View Revisited
Why are contemporary populations still aging?In the Classic view population aging has been driven almost entirely by fertility decline over the demographic transition, while mortality decline has played a minor role.In this view, populations today are still aging because they are still converging toward the new older stable age distribution.But in the past 25 years an elegant mathematical decomposition of changing mean ages has sometimes been int…
Rising longevity, education, savings, and growth
The Formal Dynamics of Controlled Populations and the Echo, the Boom and the Bust
This paper analyzes the pattern of fluctuations of births in an age-structured population whose growth is subject to environmental or economic constraint. It synthesizes the traditional demographic analysis of age-structured renewal with constant vital rates and the economic analysis which treats population change endogenously. When cohort fertility depends on relative cohort size, or when period fertility depends on labor force size, fluctuation…
Famine, revolt, and the dynastic cycle: Population dynamics in historic China
Inverse Projection and Back Projection: A Critical Appraisal, and Comparative Results for England, 1539 to 1871
Inverse projection and back projection are two methods for exploiting long historical series of births and deaths to produce estimates of population size and age structure, net migration, and vital rates. While inverse projection requires extraneous information on population size at scattered dates, back projection does not. In this paper I argue that back projection attempts an impossible task, and can only arbitrarily select one demographic pas…
Death and Taxes: Longer life, consumption, and social security
We analyze in three steps the influence of the projected mortality decline on the long run finances of the Social Security System. First, on a theoretical level, mortality decline adds person years of life which are distributed across the life cycle. The interaction of this distribution with the age distribution of labor earnings minus consumption, or of taxes minus benefits, partially determines the corresponding steady state financial consequen…
Some macroeconomic aspects of global population aging
Across the demographic transition, declining mortality followed by declining fertility produces decades of rising support ratios as child dependency falls. These improving support ratios raise per capita consumption, other things equal, but eventually deteriorate as the population ages. Population aging and the forces leading to it can produce not only frightening declines in support ratios but also very substantial increases in productivity and …
Probabilistic Approaches to Population Forecasting
ON AVERAGE people live long lives, have a long lag between birth and childbearing, and experience demographic rates with highly regular age patterns. These patterns generally change quite slowly. For these reasons, population is reliably predictable over fairly long periods compared to economic performance or the weather. Nonetheless, demographic forecasting does involve a good deal of uncertainty. We know that the US population will age rapidly …
Accidental and Systematic Change in Population History: Homeostasis in a Stochastic Setting
Population Homeostasis and English Demographic History
Ronald Lee, Population Homeostasis and English Demographic History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 15, No. 4, Population and Economy: From the Traditional to the Modern World (Spring, 1985), pp. 635-660
Estimating series of vital rates and age structures from baptisms and burials: A new technique, with applications to pre-industrial England
This paper presents a technique for deriving demographic information from long aggregate time series of baptisms and burials. Specifically, this technique provides quinquennial estimates of population size, age structure, life expectancy and gross reproduction rates. It assumes that age-specific fertility and mortality schedules belong to one-parameter families, and that the effects of net migration and under-registration cancel. It complements r…
Intergenerational Transfers, the Biological Life Cycle, and Human Society
Mental Health
MENTAL HEALTH Get access Mental Health Through Christian Community. By HOWARD J. CLINEBELL . New York-Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1965. 300 pages. $4.75. No Borrowed Light. By AUSTIN DONDERO . Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Co., 1965. xi+166 pages. $3.95. RONALD LEE RONALD LEE King's CollegeBrisbane Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume XXXV, Issue 1, March 196…
The Formal Dynamics of Controlled Populations and the Echo, the Boom and the Bust
This paper analyzes the pattern of fluctuations of births in an age-structured population whose growth is subject to environmental or economic constraint. It synthesizes the traditional demographic analysis of age-structured renewal with constant vital rates and the economic analysis which treats population change endogenously. When cohort fertility depends on relative cohort size, or when period fertility depends on labor force size, fluctuation…
Estimating series of vital rates and age structures from baptisms and burials: A new technique, with applications to pre-industrial England
This paper presents a technique for deriving demographic information from long aggregate time series of baptisms and burials. Specifically, this technique provides quinquennial estimates of population size, age structure, life expectancy and gross reproduction rates. It assumes that age-specific fertility and mortality schedules belong to one-parameter families, and that the effects of net migration and under-registration cancel. It complements r…
Methods and Models for Analyzing Historical Series of Births, Deaths, and Marriages
Target Fertility, Contraception, And Aggregate Rates: Toward A Formal Synthesis
This paper develops a stock adjustment model relating total expected births to conventional aggregate fertility rates for married women over 25. Each year, cohorts bear about 20 percent of their additional expected births. Aggregate U.S. rates have been consistent with expectations as expressed in surveys between 1955 and 1975; indeed, total expected births may be inferred from aggregate fertility behavior. A peculiar empirical finding is that th…
The Editor's Corner
associated expenses will be covered by a grant from the Harvard Business School. The Fellow may begin his 12 months' residence on either July 1 or September 1, 1979
Population Patterns in the past
Age Structure Intergenerational Transfers and Economic Growth: An Overview
Age Structure, Intergenerational Transfers and Economic Growth: An Overview
[fre] nome. Lorsque l'on envisage les enfants comme membres du ménage, les effets de la répartition par âge paraissent moins importants. Dans tous les cas, une croissance démographique plus rapide abaisse le capital par travailleur et, donc, le revenu par tête ; il semble que cet effet de croissance domine les effets de la répartition par âge. [eng] Age structure, intergenerational transfers and economic growth : an overview Ronald Lee This paper…
Aiming at a moving target: Period fertility and changing reproductive goals
Common sense suggests that changes over time in aggregate period fertility rates should be closely, related to changes in desired completed fertility after controlling for contraceptive failure, and desired spacing and timing; the nature of the relationship is, however, far from clear. This paper shows that when desired completed fertility undergoes swings, like those in the United States in recent decades, the turning points in period fertility …
Population Patterns in the Past
Economics of Population
The Population History of England 1541-1871. A Reconstruction
The Population History of England, 1541-1871. A Reconstruction
De Roma a Manila: El Cambio De La Demografía en El Transcurso De Tres Décadas
Age distribution adjustments for English censuses, 1821 to 1931
We use Demeny and Shorter's method, and some modifications of it, to derive estimates of adjustment coefficients to the distribution of women's ages for the English censuses of 1821, and 1841–1931, and to estimate mortality and fertility for the intercensal quinquennia 1841–1871. For 1861/71 we also derive adjustment factors for the age distribution of men. We find that initially women aged 20–24, but not men, were over-enumerated by eight or nin…
Inverse Projection and Back Projection: A Critical Appraisal, and Comparative Results for England, 1539 to 1871
Inverse projection and back projection are two methods for exploiting long historical series of births and deaths to produce estimates of population size and age structure, net migration, and vital rates. While inverse projection requires extraneous information on population size at scattered dates, back projection does not. In this paper I argue that back projection attempts an impossible task, and can only arbitrarily select one demographic pas…
Population Homeostasis and English Demographic History
Ronald Lee, Population Homeostasis and English Demographic History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 15, No. 4, Population and Economy: From the Traditional to the Modern World (Spring, 1985), pp. 635-660
The new populist campaign for economic democracy: A rhetorical exploration
This essay explores the New Populism as a developing form of political action. Focusing on the rhetoric of the Campaign for Economic Democracy, it analyzes the relationships between radical opposition and electoral commitments
Population dynamics of humans and other animals
Human population dynamics, at least until the past century, have probably been governed by homeostasis and in this resembled those of other animals. Because human population homeostasis was probably substantially weaker than among large mammals, its operation has been less obvious. Nonetheless, the empirical evidence for advanced agriculturalists is compelling. Unlike animals, the human population has tended toward equilibria that have been tendi…
Population Growth and Economic Development: Issues and Evidence
This volume reviews the available empirical evidence on the interrelationships between population growth and economic development in developing countries from a variety of perspectives. Issues examined include the relationship between population growth and natural resources; agriculture; savings investment and trade; health education and welfare; and labor and urbanization. Several chapters attempt to unravel the conceptual issues involved in und…
Population Growth and Economic Development: Issues and Evidence
Intergenerational Flows of Time and Goods: Consequences of Slowing Population Growth
This paper develops a theoretical model of intergenerational transfers inc orporating time use. With the aid of time budget and consumer expendi ture surveys, empirical estimates of the age profiles of various type s of time and goods consumption are presented, and the authors conclu de that (1) the net direction of intergenerational transfers is from younger to older ages; (2) under the golden-rule assumption, these tr ansfers largely constitute…
U.S. births and limit cycle Models
Lee’s (1974) formal demographic feedback models summarize the implications for births and age-structure of neo-Malthusian theories of baby booms such as those of Easterlin. For some parameter values, such models imply sustained cycles, so-called “limit cycles,” in births. Frauenthal and Swick recently reestimated a continuous-age version of Lee’s basic cohort model with U.S. series and, contrary to Lee’s original findings, concluded that “limit c…
The featuring of will in history: A rhetorical exploration of Richard Nixon's post‐presidential writings
The post‐presidential writings of Richard Nixon are a symptom of the ailing health of public morality in liberal society. Using the venue of foreign policy commentary, Nixon constructed a series of histories featuring an overarching concern for the “will. “ The emphasis on “will” permitted Nixon to work out the tension between the theoretical man and the man of action, transforming the standards of higher moral principle into the politics of expe…
Demography (46 works) · Sociology (45 works) · Population (44 works) · Economics (42 works) · Global Health Care Issues (31 works) · Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management (29 works) · Demography (27 works) · Demographic economics (23 works) · Political science (23 works) · Geography (22 works)