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Ansley J. Coale, 85, Demographer
Coale was educated entirely at Princeton University (B.A., M.A. and Ph.D.) and spent his whole academic career at its Office of Population Research, serving as director from 1959 to 1975. He served as president of the Population Association of America in 1967-1968 and as president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population from 1977 to 1981. He 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 Liege. He was also a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He was very prolific, publishing more than 125 books and articles on a wide variety of demographic topics. He also trained and served as mentor to many students who became leaders in the field. His first major influential work was Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries (1958), coauthored 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 was followed by Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (1966), coauthored 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 explicated in Methods of Estimating Basic Demographic Measures from Incomplete Data (1967, with Demeny) and in The Demography of Tropical Africa (1968, with other demographers). Coale was an able mathematician (he taught radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during World War II), and his Age and Structure of Human Populations (1972) is an essential textbook for those interested in formal demography. Perhaps Coale's major scientific contribution was to our understanding of the demographic transition. He was the intellectual architect of the European Fertility Project, which examined the remarkable decline in marital fertility in Europe. Initiated in 1963, the project eventually resulted in the publication of nine major books (culminating in The Decline of Fertility in Europe, 1986, edited by Coale and Susan Watkins) summarizing the changes in childbearing over a century in the seven hundred provinces in Europe. Toward the end of his career, Coale became interested in the population changes in China and understanding the fertility transition there as well as factors affecting the sex ratio at birth. During his many years on the Princeton campus, Ansley was a familiar figure on his bicycle and on the tennis and squash courts. He is survived by his wife Sarah, two sons and three grandchildren. The University honored Coale in June by naming its demographic research library "The Ansley J. Coale Population Research Collection". Contributions in honor of Ansley Coale may be made to the endowment that supports this collection.
Memorial ServiceA memorial service was held in Dodds Auditorium in Robertson Hall at 2:00pm on Saturday, December 14, with a reception afterwards.
You can view the memorial service by selecting a file type and connection speed from the choices below. The service was approximately one hour long.
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Ansley Johnson Coale, William Church Osborne Professor of Public Affairs and
Professor of Economics, emeritus, died on November 5 at Pennswood Retirement
community in Bucks County, PA. The cause was heart failure following
several years with Parkinson’s disease.
