Mortality Compression and the Rectangularization of Survival
How the survival curve became a rectangle and why it changes everything about planning a life
How Cohort Size Shapes Competition and Opportunity Across the Life Course
Birth cohort size determines competitive pressure at every institutional gateway—and the effects are far from symmetric
Social Security Cohort Progressivity: Winners and Losers by Birth Year
Birth year silently determines your Social Security returns—early cohorts won a lottery later generations finance.
Grandparenting Across Cohorts: The Transformation of Multigenerational Relations
Demographic shifts have restructured when, how, and whether generations connect—creating unprecedented opportunity alongside new forms of multigenerational inequality.
Racial Mortality Crossovers: The Cohort Selection Paradox
When lifelong disadvantage eliminates the vulnerable early, survivors appear advantaged—the demographic paradox of mortality selection.
Immigration Cohorts and Assimilation Trajectories
How arrival timing shapes immigrant integration across generations through selection, reception, and transmission
Housing Market Timing and Generational Wealth Divergence
How the year you reach home-buying age shapes wealth trajectories across generations through mechanisms of cumulative advantage
Educational Expansion and Credential Inflation Across Cohorts
When everyone earns more credentials, the meaning of credentials transforms—and inequality finds new ways to reproduce itself.
The Silent Revolution Revisited: Value Change Across Half a Century of Cohorts
Fifty years of cohort data reveals which predictions about generational value change proved right—and why the trajectory has reversed.
Demographic Windows: When Age Structure Creates Opportunity or Crisis
Why temporary favorable age ratios require institutional preparation to translate into lasting prosperity
The Cohort Replacement Engine: How Societies Transform Without Anyone Changing Their Mind
Population turnover drives most social transformation—not persuasion, but demographic arithmetic replacing old worldviews with new.
Scarring and Imprinting: When Historical Events Become Lifetime Characteristics
How historical events during formative years create lasting generational characteristics that reshape societies for decades
Marriage Market Dynamics Across Cohorts: When Numbers Don't Match
How birth cohort sizes and sex ratios create invisible structural constraints that determine marriage outcomes across generations.
Political Generations and the Realignment Puzzle
Why the voters entering politics today matter more for 2040 than any campaign will—and how demography reshapes democracy.
Fertility Timing and the Transformation of Family Formation Patterns
How fertility postponement compounds across generations, reshaping family structures and population trajectories through momentum effects that persist for decades.
Period Versus Cohort: The Most Consequential Methodological Debate in Social Science
Why every confident claim about generational differences conceals untestable assumptions that could reverse the conclusion entirely
Health Trajectories and the Hidden Cohort Gradient in Mortality
Your birth year programs health trajectories that compound across decades, revealing how historical conditions become embodied in population mortality patterns.
Generational Wealth Transfers and Stratification Persistence
How delayed inheritance and strategic lifetime gifts create compounding wealth advantages that earned income cannot overcome across successive generations.
Why Birth Year Predicts Economic Mobility Better Than Any Policy
How the economic conditions you entered the workforce into created lifetime earnings paths that compound across decades.
Why People Have Fewer Children Than They Say They Want
Demographic analysis reveals why cohorts consistently fall short of their stated fertility desires despite stable two-child preferences across generations.