The data is now available for all teams who've already signed up! More sign-ups very welcome! Happy analysing! 💻📊

Since pandemic mortality is clearly still a question people seem to be confused about, this project at the LSE is showing us where we need to go: www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His... #histmed #PublicHealth #PandemicThinking #ExcessMortality

Following major European pandemics and wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, "recovery times across events averaged approximately seven years and showed no significant statistical differences by event type or sex," find Silva & Aburto in new article: doi.org/10.1007/s426...

The pronatalists have done an excellent job of using bad demography to convince the legacy media that low birth rates are a crisis. They are using bad demography to whitewash their sexism, racism, Christian nationalism, classism, & anti-LGBTQ sentiments. It’s why my colleagues & I wrote this:

📢 Call for Papers! Workshop Accuracy of Cause-of-Death Registration: Everyday Conditions, Crises & Epidemics 🗓 18–19 Mar 2026 | Barcelona 🇪🇸 Submit 200–300 word abstracts by 10 Dec 2025 👉 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

This is such a great idea. Excess mortality estimates are so crucial... and *so* tricky. We have very little expert consensus about how they should be done. Changing that is a really smart, consequential research frontier to focus effort on.

🗣️Exciting PhD opportunity! Join @lshtm.bsky.social PSG and @mpidr.bsky.social as a PhD student/Research Assistant on an 3-year project leading to a funded PhD. The role focuses on developing cutting-edge methods to model health & mortality in low-income countries. jobs.lshtm.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

📢 Interested in excess mortality methods, and want a challenge? I'm organising the "One Epidemic, Many Estimates" (1EME) project! Register *now* as a many analyst team (submissions due 15 March 2026), and then join us at LSE for a workshop on 21-22 May 2026! (1/n) www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His...

#LifeExpectancy rose rapidly in the first half of the 20th century. But will those born between 1939 and 2000 benefit from these rapid gains in #longevity? A recent study suggests that none of these #generations will reach 100 years of age on average. 1/2 www.demogr.mpg.de/go/LifeExpectancy2025

This piece in WaPo by @zhoyoyo.bsky.social, "The two reasons Americans aren’t having babies, according to data," has an unusual amount of wrong things, starting with the incorrectly labeled figure at the very top www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...

coincidentally my historical research today led me to this, from 1970

Want to know why demographers aren't panicking over low birth rates? @lesja.bsky.social, @shelleydclark.bsky.social, & I have a new piece in @theconversation.com explaining the faulty logic that underlies the low birth rate-induced population panic than fuels the pronatalism movement. 1/n

🧮 A new preprint of my first dissertation chapter "From disparate lists to population estimates: A multiple systems estimation workflow for mortality analysis in conflict settings” is now online. doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Over the weekend, BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions programme - not typically a bastion of far-right values - included uncontested claims of how “low birthrates are the biggest problem the UK faces”. Worrying how quickly this view, rejected by experts in demography, is becoming mainstream

Great piece on how to get the most out of many-analyst projects! Any similar commentaries out there? I might be cooking up my own many-analyst project for demography soon 🍴

1/ Is population collapsing? It felt like time to process some of my #demography feelings about recent #population panic. While demographers don't endorse generational labels (ahem @philipncohen.com),for this GenXer there will always be Princess Bride memes. open.substack.com/pub/jenndowd...?

When people talk about other people not having "enough" children, remember that fertility rates have been roughly this low in much of Europe since the 1970s *and* some European countries had rates below 2 in the 1920s and 30s! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Reach out if you would like to present your work and discuss with other folks that are into formal demography 🤓👇 you can just fill out this form: 🔗 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... formaldemography.github.io/working_grou...

Reminder that the Formal Demography Working Group is meeting tomorrow! Sign up to receive Zoom details: formaldemography.github.io/working_group/

A student yesterday: "Not even ChatGPT understands Lexis diagrams..." I guess the spatial logic of triangles, squares, and parallelograms trips it up? I just asked it to explain and draw a Lexis parallelogram, and yeah, it didn't go great. Maybe a tip for testing demographic reasoning these days!

📜 NEW WORKING PAPER 📜 What was the true case fatality rate (CFR) of smallpox? My new paper with Romola Davenport (Cambridge) revisits this question using 18th-century data from Sweden and Iceland—and challenges the long-held belief that smallpox CFRs were 20–30%. 🧵👇 1/6

Reminder that earlier naturalization leads to better integration of immigrants. Extending the period necessary for settlement in the UK will have exactly the opposite effect of what Starmer and the Labour leadership claim. "Migrants first have to prove themselves" is a nativist trope and bad policy.

I want to talk population panic & understanding demography. New estimates from @ncfmr-bgsu.bsky.social on completed fertility in the US show that, among women 45-50 in 2024, about 15% were childless. Two-thirds of women had 2 or more children. 1/ doi.org/10.25035/ncf...

Hey demographers! We're starting up the formal demography working group again! Next Friday 16 May at 11:30am ET @hggaddy.bsky.social will talk to us about challenges in estimating crisis mortality. Excited! Head to the website to sign up for Zoom details: formaldemography.github.io/working_group/

My new book, “Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary” publishes today from @princetonupress.bsky.social My goal in writing this book is to facilitate a better conversation. A short thread…

Biosocial folks, do we know a single intergenerational effect in humans that 1) is socially relevant, and 2) is definitely epigenetic, since social mechanisms have been ruled out? I'm reading this great piece from 2018, but maybe someone has found El Dorado since? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join us for the next CHIPH seminar (in collab. with @psglshtm.bsky.social) on Thursday 15 May, when Dr. Rachell Sánchez-Rivera will be discussing state-sponsored population control in 20th century Mexico. Details below: Location: G24, Keppel St. Time: 12:45 - 14:00 www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...

The biggest project I've worked on for the last chunk of years was just published. It asks, how big are US Black-white lifespan differences? This might seem like a narrow question. I hope to convince you by the end that there are answers you didn't anticipate. And I hope some of them will move you.

Next Wednesday, 7 May, I'll give a Campop seminar on some of my recent excess mortality methods work! The focus is on historical epidemics, but I'll also touch on low-data settings and using excess mortality for inference in general. Let me know if you want the Teams link!

We are live! Introducing the "Journal of Robustness Reports" – a Diamond Open-Access journal dedicated to publishing short reanalyses of empirical findings. Check out our website and blog post about the journal: 🌐 scipost.org/JRobustRep 📄 www.bayesianspectacles.org/introducing-...

In our new paper, @thegargiulian.bsky.social and I argue that demographers can't be afraid to be qualitative. There are many historical and contemporary crises where the most objectively accurate information available is qualitative, not quantitative www.demographic-research.org/articles/vol...

In historical and conflict demography, it is common to estimate a large death toll as the discontinuity between two observed or projected population estimates. @hggaddy.bsky.social and @thegargiulian.bsky.social show why this method creates important problems for demographic and econometric work.

🚨 New paper: when researchers study epidemics, disasters, or conflicts but don't know how many people died, they often subtract pre and post population estimates or do a crude projection. Unfortunately, this almost never provides an accurate death toll 🧵 www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol5...

“gathering accurate population data is fundamentally about making everyone visible…When people vanish from data, they vanish from policy” theconversation.com/global-popul...

He's also wrong about polygyny resulting in less healthy babies. As @davidwlawson.bsky.social and colleagues' work has shown, when confounding factors are appropriately controlled for, associations between polygyny and poor child health disappear doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Since polygyny is back in the news today, a reminder that the huge political science literature linking polygyny to civil war and male aggression is based on faulty demographic assumptions about how polygynous marriage markets work! 🧵

New pub alert! The first of several in the pipeline showing that subjective perceptions of well-being and uncertainty about the future are important for understanding contemporary childbearing decisions in the US.

(2/4) We are organising three social events in the upcoming weeks! 🎉 Meet up with peers over drinks and bites at the ESSHC, EHS, and PAA conferences See the newsletter for more information on where 📍and when 📆 !

Are you working in a setting where historical data is at risk of being lost/erased/removed? Let the OAH know. I think this is an important way to account for what's there now so that we understand what goes missing. You can fill out the form anonymously. #historysky www.oah.org/2025/03/12/r...

📢 GREATLEAP Networking Event! At the same time and place, @thegreatleap22116.bsky.social is hosting an informal event to talk to peers and mentors about mortality. With drinks! Want to sign up? ⬇️ 📍 Einstein, Leiden 📆 27 March 18:00-20:00 ℹ️ Info & registration: greatleap.eu/event/mentor...

I'm co-organising the historical demography strand for PopFest 2025! We're looking forward to a range of interesting talks from UK and European students — economic historians and historians of medicine also welcome! Get in touch if you want to chat about submitting!👋 www.cpc.ac.uk/activities/p...

Great new article that I read in draft form. Short title: "The Influenza of 1918–1920 at Nonreservation Indian Boarding Schools." Key finding: mortality rate at schools far exceeded general mortality. Social, economic, and demographic factors clearly matter in a pandemic. Find it: shorturl.at/coIO2

The deadline to submit for the ESHD conference was extended to Valentine's Day! 😍 So, you can still submit to the AYHD's Flash session. This session will let you discuss early work-in-progress with other early-career researchers. To submit, mention "Flash session (AYHD)" in the Session proposal! ☑️

Things I cant believe I have to say: Small, invisible, and disadvantaged populations are not too messy for quantitative analysis and populations studies.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic in Malawi, we piloted new method to detect excess mortality in small areas with limited death registration. Based on periodic short surveys of perceptions of the frequency of funerals. The (promising) results are here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39471519/ #episky #IDsky

They're not on Bluesky yet, but please come to the European Society of Historical Demography seminar next Tuesday (19/11)! Diego Ramiro-Fariñas will be presenting on interactions between the 1918 flu and tuberculosis infection, and I will be chairing! DM me if you need the link

Another Starter Pack for disease & pandemic research. This one is definitely smaller to start, since I'm not sure who has migrated over from the other place where I was following loads of people. Again, reply if you want to be added: go.bsky.app/M2ptNQM

I'm presenting some excess mortality methods work from my PhD at the Office of National Statistics tomorrow! Email / DM me if you want a link to join online, and don't mind thinking about more ghosts on Halloween 👻🎃

A reminder that the deadline for abstracts for this June 2025 conference to be held in Naples, Italy, has been extended to 15 November. #histmed #skystorians #EpiSky