Ansley J. Coale

Early childhood and education

Ansley Coale was the youngest of three children born from Nellie and James Coale. One year after he was born, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he spent most of his early years receiving an "excellent" education.

The Coale family moved to Annapolis, Maryland, in 1928. Ansley Coale attended a public high school starting in 1930. His intentions were to enroll in Princeton University like his older brother, Jim, did in 1933. By the time Ansley was 16 years old, he was ready to graduate high school. After an extra year at the Mercersburg Academy, a preparatory school, he was accepted into Princeton. This extra year of education was not only important for his intellectual development, but he ended up having 18 companions from the academy that also went to Princeton.

After he obtained his Bachelor's of Arts (BA) and master's degree in economics, Ansley Coale was offered a fellowship by the director of the Office of Population Research, Frank Notestein, as long as demography was a field of study. Over the years, the two of them became well-known demographers. In 1947, six years after he received his master's degree, Ansley Coale obtained his Ph.D.

Works

In addition to being the William Church Osborne Professor of Public Affairs Emeritus and professor of economics emeritus at Princeton University, Coale was a prolific author, publishing more than 125 books and articles on a wide variety of demographic topics. His Growth and Structure of Human Populations (1972) is considered an essential textbook for those interested in formal demography. He also trained and served as a mentor to many students who would become leaders in the field.

Coale joined the faculty at Princeton in 1947, the same year he received his Ph.D. at the same site. He spent his entire academic career at the university's Office of Population Research, serving as director from 1959 to 1975. He was president of the Population Association of America in 1967–68 and president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) from 1977 to 1981.

Coale's first major influential work was Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries (1958), which he co-wrote with Edgar Hoover. The results, which showed that slowing population growth could enhance economic development, had a major impact on public policy and set the research agenda in this field.

This study was followed by Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (1966), which he co-wrote with Paul Demeny. These model life tables both established new empirical regularities and proved invaluable in the development of later techniques for estimating mortality and fertility in populations with inaccurate or incomplete data. Along with William Brass, Coale pioneered the development and use of these techniques, first explained in Methods of Estimating Basic Demographic Measures From Incomplete Data (1967, with Demeny) and in The Demography of Tropical Africa (1968, with other demographers).

Perhaps Coale's most major scientific contribution was to the understanding of the demographic transition. The Demographic Transition, as stated by Coale, occurs when a country develops a strong economy, and within the society, low fertility and mortality will start to reflect based upon the economic standpoint. Coale was the pioneer of the European Fertility Project, which examined the decline in marital fertility in Europe. The European Fertility Project's goal was to correlate the fertility rates within married couples with the rate of infant mortality. Coale established three pre-conditions to fertility decline. The first is "within the conscious of choice." In other words, it is up to the individual and within their own decision whether or not to have children. The second is that if a society sees not having children as advantageous, then fertility will decline. The third pre-condition is to have contraception methods ready. A society will start to show signs of fertility decline if these three pre-conditions are met.

Honors

Coale was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was a recipient of several honorary degrees from universities including Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Louvain and the University of Liège. He was also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.

Selected bibliography

Coale, Ansley J. (1967). “Factors associated with the development of low fertility: An historic summary,” in United Nations, Proceedings of the World Population Conference, Belgrade, 30 August–10 September 1965. Vol. 2. New York: United Nations: 205–9.

——— (1969). “The decline of fertility in Europe from the French Revolution to World War II,” in S. J. Behrman and Leslie Corsa, Eds. Fertility and Family Planning: A World View. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 3–24.

——— (1971). “Age patterns at marriage.” Population Studies 25: 193–214.

——— (1972). The Growth and Structure of Human Populations: A Mathematical Investigation. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

——— (1978). "Population Growth and Economic Development: The Case of Mexico." Foreign Affairs 56(2): 415–429.

——— (1984). Rapid Population Change in China, 1952-1982. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

——— (1991). "Excess Female Mortality and the Balance of the Sexes in the Population: An Estimate of the Number of "Missing Females," Population and Development Review 17(3): 517–523.

——— (1992). “Age of entry into marriage and the date of the initiation of voluntary birth control.” Demography 29: 333–41.

——— (1996). "Age Patterns and Time Sequence of Mortality in National Populations with the Highest Expectation of Life at Birth." Population and Development Review 22.

——— (1996). "Five Decades of Missing Females in China," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 140 (4): 421–450.