With the insight and clarity that mark all of Petersen's writings, Against the Stream brings together reflections of an unconventional demographer. Thirteen essays on various topics become a cohesive unit by virtue of the author's unique point of view, and the understanding of contemporary events he has gathered in his long mastery of demography is evident in this volume.

In a brief introduction the author points out that the viewpoints he expresses in the volume are unorthodox. He covers a variety of topics. Chapter 1 examines utopian thought, which Petersen notes usually...

In Petersen's Malthus both the general reader and the social scientist are given a basis for contrasting Malthus with competing theories. As a background to...

Official statistics about ethnicity in advanced societies are no better than those in less developed countries. An open industrial society is inherently fluid, and it is as hard to interpret social class and ethnic groups there as in a nearly static community. In consequence, the collection and interpretation of ethnic statistics is frequently a battleground where the groups being counted contest each element of every enumeration.

William Petersen describes how ethnic identity is determined and how ethnic or racial units are counted by official statistical agencies in the United...

From Birth to Death is a detailed analysis of how population statistics are collected in the United States, particularly by the Bureau of the Census. It describes the errors and other flaws typically found in such data.

Petersen sets out the fundamentals of demography and reviews the current proposal to use sampling in the census. He then reviews examples of how ignoring age and sex structure leads to false conclusions. Petersen explores race and ethnicity and the dilemmas inherent in the necessarily ambiguous definitions of these categories. He also analyzes the problems of women...