4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Does adjusting death rates for age make populations genuinely comparable—or remove part of what needs explaining? This 1905 seminar report, by an unidentified reporter, records Joseph A. Schumpeter’s examination of the standard-population method. Applying age-specific mortality rates to a common age distribution offers a way to compare populations with different proportions of young and old. Yet the report presses a causal objection: a country’s age structure may itself reflect, and shape, its social and health conditions. What can reasonably be treated as incidental in an occupational group may be integral to a national comparison. The interest lies in this distinction between numerical adjustment and warranted explanation, and in the report’s qualified defence of standardization for carefully specified inquiries rather than general judgements of public health.