Title:	A Practitioner’s Guide to State and Local Population Projections
Authors:	Stanley K. Smith Jeff Tayman David A. Swanson KENNETH C. LAND
Keywords:	Local Population Projections
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	A large part of our daily lives is governed by numbers. How many hours of sleep did I get last night? How many unread messages are queued up in my inbox? How many “friends” do I have on Facebook? What’s the upcoming Powerball payoff? How’s my cholesterol count doing? Can I recall my daughter’s phone number, my granddaughter’s birthday? Numbers such as these encompass portions of our personal and shared social reality. They roll around in our head, and they are part of what determine our mood, our behavior, well-being, worries, and activity constraints. Population projections also present us with numbers. But these are numbers of a very different nature. Rather than simply reflecting a social reality (and associated beliefs and behaviors), they serve to create a reality based on anticipation—a reality unwitnessed, unobserved, and largely unknown. Yet, on the basis of such numbers, schools are built (or closed), roads are widened, airport terminals expanded, municipal services extended, and marketing strategies altered. So this book is about the second kind of number, the sort leading to anticipatory behaviors and, occasionally, preemptive actions. It is the applied demographer’s difficult role to creatively deploy the data, tools, and perspectives of the population sciences to carry out these tasks not only ethically and transparently but with an experienced and disciplined hand. This book provides a marvelously clear, well-organized, and comprehensive blueprint for understanding and competently performing this role. The authors are seasoned applied demographic practitioners. They have individually and collaboratively contributed mightily to the demographic literature. The book is intellectually solid, methodologically encompassing, and—while retaining the historically interesting material—firmly contemporary and up to date. Early in my own career, one of my mentors rhetorically asked, “Why do we make population projections? They always turn out to be wrong, so why do we persist?” After a brief excursion through the standard reasons for why projections are useful, he added, “Probably the most important reason for engaging in this enterprise is so that we later know what to be surprised about.” Wonderfully said! The point is that we live in a world of frenetic change. We are so habituated to mindlessly accommodating to this change that we rarely pause long enough to say “Wow!” and to reflect on what we thought, just a few years back, our present reality might look like. Projections and forecasts prepared yesterday permit us to do that today. Today’s projections will serve that potentially chastening purpose tomorrow. The overall narrative and thoroughly developed methodologies in A Practitioner’s Guide to State and Local Population Projections will, of course, not eliminate all of tomorrow’s surprises. One can indeed hope, however, that practitioners who wisely select to use this book to guide their own demographic pursuits will benefit from the authors’ skillful verve, their richly detailed methodological coverage, and the numerous concrete examples presented throughout the material to minimize the number and magnitude of future surprises. This valuable compendium presents methods that are tried and tested alongside those that are recent and innovative. The book revisits and updates most of the topics treated in the authors’ earlier book, State and Local Population Projections: Methodology and Analysis. However, the current book should not be understood as a revised edition. Fresh attention is given to emerging methodological approaches in small-area population forecasting (projecting) and, in particular, to new data resources that have fundamentally altered the information content of forecasting models. The material is treated with originality and conviction and benefits immensely from real-life illustrations drawn from the authors’ own work. With A Practitioner’s Guide to State and Local Population Projections, Smith, Tayman, and Swanson have again secured their leading place as careful, practical, and solidly competent applied demographic scholars.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/51327
ISBN:	978-94-007-7551-0
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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