"As a cohort of people, animals, or machines ages, the individuals at highest risk tend to die or exit first. This differential selection can produce patterns of mortality for the population as a whole that are surprisingly different from the patterns for subpopulations or individuals. Naive acceptance of observed population patterns may lead to erroneous policy recommendations if an interven...

To study the biological and behavioral process of the recent drastic fertility decline in China, the authors reviewed relating factors (proximate determinants) and applied the Bongaarts model to the population of China for the years 1971 and 1981, during which the fertility rate dropped most rapidly and substantial population control policies were performed. By application of the model, the de...

Developed countries with low fertility and mortality rates are already experiencing population aging and will continue to do so. Some developing countries undergoing demographic transitions are beginning to acknowledge the issues of population aging. The projected declines in fertility in other developing countries will mean substantial population aging in the future. Alternative measures for p...

Until the mid of the eighties environmental policies in the Netherlands were characterized by a separate approach to each environmental sector, a very low participation of policy target populations in the policy making process, optimistic and therefore ambitious goals, and direct regulations (permitting) as a dominant policy instrument. These policy characteristics seem to be related to a lack ...

OBJECTIVE: Some research suggests that social, political, and cultural life in the U.S. and Canada are growing divergent. We use health lifestyle theories to extend prior research and compare the U.S. and Canada on population health indicators. METHODS: The population health indicators include health behaviors, fertility, and cause-specific mortality for each of the United States (and Washingto...

Bioethics' traditional focus on clinical relationships and exotic technologies has led the field away from population health, health disparities, and issues of justice. The result: a myopic view that misses the institutional context in which clinical relationships operate and can overlook factors that affect health more broadly than do exotic technologies. A broader bioethics agenda would take ...

This essay is essentially divided into three parts. The first part is going to focus on early Soviet attitudes towards the Russian language itself, followed by a discussion of the early Soviet policies regarding non-Russian languages in the second part. The gradual shift away from the liberal language policies of the 1920s towards the new policies emerging in the late 1930s, overtly imposing Ru...

rizona’s controversial immigration law is emblematic of a new period in American immigration history that features a rampedup commitment to reduce illegal immigration and to establish a new “illegal class” of those who have already entered the United States. The debate about changes to immigration law is often framed as a moral, ethical, or legal issue, but the facts behind this debate are not ...