Daniel Courgeau

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• Director of reseach emeritus
• Research Director at National Institute for Demographic Studies

Les sciences de la population ont utilisé tout au long de leur histoire différents paradigmes : approche du moment, approche longitudinale, approche biographique, approche multiniveau. Ils ont conduit à divers types de mesures, tant des faits étudiés que des relations entre ces faits. Cet article présente et analyse les principales formes prises pa...

In this paper, we examine the four Idols – errors of thinking and judgement – which according to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) beset human minds. These are Idols of the Tribe – false assertions that the sense of man is the measure of things; Idols of the Cave – idols of the individual man; Idols of the Market Place – formed by the intercours...

This chapter aims to contribute to the debate on the role of model-based approaches, such as agent-based modelling, in the future of demography. First we call attention to the developments of the discipline since the 17th century, and we describe its four successive paradigms related to the period, cohort, event-history and multilevel perspectives....

First we describe and focus our discussion on four major approaches based on: duration between events, sequences, multiple levels, and networks. We then show how these different approaches are linked to two major concepts: the statistical individual and the statistical network. The problems encountered when using one of the four approaches above a...

As we have seen throughout this work, many if not all social sciences adopt different approaches to human life. None, however, genuinely tries to consider it in its full complexity. Each addresses only some of its aspects. Human life, therefore, appears to loom larger than all the social sciences while constituting one of their key elements. This c...

Presentation de l'ouvrage de Bernard Lahire (2023): Les structures fondamentales des sociétés humaines. Pour lui il apparait nécessaire de replacer l'espèce humaine dans une continuité évolutive, qui permette de mesurer la robustesse de nombreux mécanismes sociaux; Cette base se trouve dans l'anthropologie, et diverses diciplines telles que la préh...

Notre objectif est de mettre en évidence l'impact à long terme d'événements démographiques majeurs ayant affecté les populations du nord de la France entre le VIe et le IVe siècle. Appliquer la méthode d'inférence bayésienne à des séries ostéologiques issues des nécropoles mérovingiennes et carolingiennes de Normandie, d'Ile-de-France et de Champag...

Nécessité de dépasser l'approche longitudinale. Nous avons vu dans le chapitre précédant les hypothèses à la base de l'analyse longitudinale. Si elles sont acceptables pour l'étude de certains phénomènes démographiques, pour la migration et la mobilité, elles ne le sont plus. Ainsi pour les migrations par mariage ou par union libre, il paraît impos...

Cette réunion d'articles, d'origine variée, sur la répartition spatiale des populations, montre l'intérêt du rapprochement de disciplines aussi diverses que la démographie, l'économie, la géographie et la sociologie.

Nous avons abordé dans le Chapitre 1, les diverses mesures de la mobilité permises par les recensements : migrants au cours d'un période pouvant varier d'un an à 10 ans, migrants hors du lieu de naissance, derniers migrants avant le recensement. Ces diverses mesures ne sont pas indépendantes entre elles, et il doit exister certaines relations les r...

This discussion with the philosopher Zahra Sadat Rooszafsai is about the different methods I used to try to understand human life and about the Methodos Series I am editing with the philosopher Robert Franck. I publish this method with her agreement.

This second chapter of the forthcoming book on Modelling of human mobility, looks at how period analysis of human mobility was established and how it functions. First, we will see how to model the physic or social distance between individuals, to understand human mobility: gravitational models were first used, and more as far back as 1846, and we w...

This first chapter of the forthcoming book on Modelling of human mobility, examines the spatial and temporal problems of human mobility. It first looks at space which is distinguished between physical space, territorial and social space. The notion of residence would permit to situate an individual in the physical space. However, it is impossible...

In this paper: (Bio)Anthropology and/or demography, we examine the controversy between the two perspectives for studying humankind: anthropology and social sciences. Anthropology overrates the clinical inventory of the socio cognitive acts that generate a belief, by declaring that this inventory is enough to destroy the realist claim of social scie...

OBJECT This Book Series is devoted to examining and solving the major methodological problems social sciences are facing. Take for example the gap between empirical and theoretical research, the explanatory power of models, the relevance of multilevel analysis, the weakness of cumulative knowledge, the role of ordinary knowledge in the research pro...

In the paper written with Jakub Bijak, Robert Franck and Eric Silverman: Model based demography: towards a research agenda, published in 2017 in Agent-based modelling in population studies (André Grow and Jan Van Bavel eds.) by Springer, we proposed to discover the principles governing the process that generate some properties of society given by d...

La lecture de ce volume invite à l'ouverture d'esprit et l'ambition méthodologique dès l'examen de son sommaire. En effet l'objectif est universel: littéralement "comprendre la vie humaine". Et pour cela, l'auteur annonce de prime abord que le défi réside dans la capacité discutable des différentes approches à proposer des théories explicatives de...

This book review made by Eva Lelièvre shows how "Understanding human life" lies in the ability of different approaches to offer explanatory theories of an experience that is at once intimate and universal.

Il importe dès le départ d'indiquer que cet ouvrage ne traitera pas de la mobilité spatiale dans toute sa généralité mais va s'attaquer à la modélisation mathématique de ce phénomène qui, depuis la fin du XIX e siècle, n'a cessé de se généraliser. Dès lors, cet ouvrage va commencer par poser les deux principaux problèmes rencontrés lorsque l'on che...

The abstract emphasizes the importance of models as representations of the world, pointing to specific trends and accuracy. It allows for the examination of models in the context of historical demography and for a deeper philosophical approach to interpretation in this area.

There is a large variety of different kinds of models. However, we think that they all have in common to represent something beyond themselves: they are representations of parts of the world. As scientists, we are driven to select only a few aspects of the phenomena studied. However, these aspects will be characterized with great precision. This ex...

This article is a review of Towards a model-based approach: applications to historial demography and palaeodemography.

There is a large variety of different kinds of models. However we think that they all have in common to represent something beyond themselves: they are representations of parts of the world. As scientists, we are driven to select only a few aspects of the phenomena studied. However these aspects will be characterised with great precision. This expl...

Quel âge avez-vous vraiment ? Donnée quantitative, l'âge civil, c'est-à-dire calculé à partir de la date de naissance enregistrée à l'état civil, est à la base de la démographie depuis que les premiers démographes ont établi, il y a plus de trois siècles, le lien entre mortalité et âge. L'utilisation privilégiée de cette variable dans l'exploitatio...

The book here reviewed is aimed at social and human scientists, with focus on demographers, but is written from a much broader, philosophical perspective. Following a brief introduction laying the ground for the ensuing discussion, the book consists of two main parts. Part I, entitled “How Certain Approaches May Lead to Misunderstanding Human Life”...

This book presents two facets of research in the historical social sciences: anthropology and demography (when studying the past, the second becomes paleodemography). We describe the two disciplines in greater detail here to see whether they can be combined into a fuller vision of the social sciences or whether, on the contrary, they should be rega...

It is important to emphasize from the outset that this book will not deal with spatial mobility in a general way but will focus on the mathematical modeling of the phenomenon, which has become ever more widespread since the late nineteenth century. We therefore begin by describing the two main problems faced when attempting to compare spatial mobil...

This paper examines the controversy between the two perspectives for studying humankind: anthropology and social sciences. Anthropology overrates the clinical inventory of the socio cognitive acts that generate a belief, by declaring that this inventory is enough to destroy the realist claim of social scientists. Researchers in social sciences over...

In this volume, Jakub Bijak, along with nine researchers of the Universities of Southampton and Rostock attempts to move beyond the essentially descriptive approach too often chosen in demography, proposing instead an explonatory approach based on modelling. As an example, they provide here a detailed application to the modelling of the "migration...

Bibliographie critique de : Towards Bayesian model-based demography:agency, complexity and uncertainty in migration studies.

We focus here on three moments in the history of demography: first, its birth in the seventeenth century; second, the reservations, criticisms, and debates of a demographic as well as probabilistic nature with regard to smallpox inoculation and vaccination troughout th eighteenth and nineteenth century until the disease was eradicated in 1979; thir...

The Methodos Series is devoted to examining and solving the major methodological problems social sciences are facing. These problems are well known and yet they are seldom treated in depth in scientific litterarture because of their general nature. So that these problems may be examined and solutions found. We give also here a short presentation o...

Paleodemography aims to reconstruct the age-sex distributions of one or more sets of individuals at the time of death, and its evolution. We begin by examining the extent to which the structure by age at death of buried populations can be estimated in an efficient and controlled manner. We then review the new results of a comparative analysis, both...

These are the complete references used for the book: Understanding human life.

This book addresses the challenge of understanding human life. We compare our life experience with the attempts to grasp it by astrologers, eugenicists, psychologists, social scientists, and philosophers. How have these various disciplines sought to give substance to an experience at once so intimate and so universal? The main opposition in the lis...

In the first section of this chapter, we note the diversity of divination methods around the world, and discuss the reason for our special focus on astrology in Chapter 3; in the second section, we describe the origin of eugenics in human history; in the third and final section, we discuss the past evolution of the notion of freedom.

In Part I, we showed that the divination arts and eugenics seek to demonstrate the predictability of a person’s future, and we examined the reasons for their enduring success. Despite the latter, we debunked their claims with specific arguments. We now turn to the many difficulties encountered when trying to capture even a portion of an individual...

If our life cannot be read in the heavenly bodies that preside over our birth, could it be that our heredity consists of the book in which our fate is already partly written? That is what Galton (1822–1911) and his successors tried to demonstrate with eugenics. In this chapter we show the extreme misuses resulting from this conceptually flawed appr...

This chapter will examine how human memory develops with the aim of capturing life stories and what it records of them; we then explore how these processes are analyzed by the social sciences. We discuss the two main approaches: philosophical hermeneutics and the scientific approach to social science advocated by Bacon in 1620 and implemented by Gr...

What can lead people to believe that another entity—whether a celestial body or a gene—can determine their future? The Methodos Series, in which this book is being published, is devoted to examining and solving the major methodological problems faced by the social sciences. My opening question, therefore, deserves fuller examination here. We begin...

Whenever we face a new problem, we recall the similar ones we encountered in the past, so we try to solve it with all the information available to us. Memory therefore serves to reveal our life story. This requires us to take a closer look at how memory plays such a role, and at the scientific methods used to demonstrate it. Scientific psychologica...

If our life cannot be read in the heavenly bodies that preside over our birth, could it be that our heredity consists of the book in which our fate is already partly written? That is what Galton (1822–1911) and his successors tried to demonstrate with eugenics. In this chapter we show the extreme misuses resulting from this conceptually flawed appr...

Astronomy and astrology have been defined in many ways over the centuries, so we must begin by specifying exactly what we mean by the two terms. We show how astronomy and astrology were closely linked in antiquity. We then describe how these initial ties weakened over time, resulting in two opposite approaches to our relations with celestial phenom...

This book addresses the challenge of understanding human life. It compares our life experience with the attempts to graps it by astrologers, eugenicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, social scientists and philosophers. A comprehensive approach will try to fully understand their complexity while a more explanatory approach considers only certain...

This open access book presents a new generation multi-criteria, multi-stake holder, decision aide, called an "institutional compass". Based on hard data, the compass tells us what quality-direction we are heading in as an institution, region, system or organisation. The quality is not chosen from the usual scalar qualities of: good, neutral and bad...

Alors que les taux ou quotients permettent des comparaisons internationales de tous les autres phénomènes démographiques, pour la migration interne il n'en est rien. La plupart des pays du monde fournissent leurs données sur ces migrations en utilisant des mesures de ces mouvements au travers de divers types de découpages géographiques, le plus sou...

The very interesting papers of this session raise important questions and problems. I will try, in this discussion, to put these questions more clearly and to pose these problems more precisely. I will then ask to the different authors if they can give some answers to them.

3B survey - family, work and migration event histories. This survey, undertaken in 1981, gives a retrospecitve view of three series of events occuring all along an individual life of French men and women.

I underttok two surveys on personal relationship, one in a rural area (Nolay), the other in a urban area (Chalons sur Saône).

I undertook two surveys on personal relatioship networks: one in a rural area (Nolay) the other one in an urban area (Chalons-sur-Saône).

What cannot be said by words, can a drawing express it better?

We will first give in this talk, an historical presentation of models to show their usefulness in the past. We will then develop agent-based models, which are most used in demography and, according to this Workshop, in historical demography and palaeodemography. Eric Silverman’s book on Methodological investigations in agent-based modelling (2018)...

As artificial intelligence is now invading everything, I want to present this part of my book on Understanding human life (2022) separately to show clearly the limits of artificial intelligence.

This book, perfectly in line with the aims of the Methodos Series, develops micro-foundations for migration and other population studies through the development of model-based methods involving Bayesian statistics. This line of thought follows and completes two previous volumes of the series. First, the volume Probability and social science, which...

This open access book presents a groundbreaking approach to developing micro-foundations for demography and migration studies. It offers a unique and novel methodology for creating empirically grounded agent-based models of international migration-one of the most uncertain population processes and a top-priority policy area. The book discusses in d...

Je présente ici le bilan des recherches entreprises lors de mon éméritat précédent. Ces recherches sont essentiellement dirigées vers une réflexion approfondie sur l'histoire, la méthodologie et l'épistémologie des sciences sociales et sur la diffusion internationale de mes travaux. Elles sont parfaitement intégrées dans le programme de recherches...

La poursuite de mes activités au sein de l'Ined se fera toujours sous le projet de recherche : Epistémologie, démographie et sciences humaines, dont l'ampleur des thèmes traités la permet. Elle rejoint parfaitement les Orientations stratégiques de l'INED (années 2021-2026), sur les Observations et mesures, perspectives critiques et historiques et l...

In 1996, the publication of Spatial analysis of biodemographic data introduced a new scientific approach to the French readers. This approach quickly developed in the following years, particularly among U.S. researchers. How can we unite these two different sciences? The more negative aspect of this union appeared with the introduction of behaviour...

Paleodemographers have used various methods to estimate the age structure of a buried population, for which only biological indicators are available. These methods use a reference population whose age and biologogical indicators are known, and make various hypotheses. They raise a number of problems, both in their underlying hypotheses and the esti...

Les méthodes de mesure et d'analyse de la mobilité spatiale ont connu un important regain d'intérêt. En effet, au fur et à mesure que les pays développés achèvent leur transition démographique, les problèmes de répartition et de redistribution spatiale deviennent de plus en plus prépondérants. Simultanément, l'urbanisation rapide dans les pays en d...

L'objectif de cette préface est de se demander en quoi il peut être pertinent de lire le manuel de Daniel Courgeau aujourd'hui, malgré les changements de contexte depuis la fin des années 1980, période de la première édition. En nous appuyant sur une description succincte de ce changement de contexte, nous montrerons que les apports théoriques de l...

La première édition de cet ouvrage, en 1988, s’était faite dans un contexte où les méthodes d’analyse et de mesure de la mobilité spatiale connaissaient un important regain d’intérêt, notamment de la part des gouvernements. L’urbanisation et les changements dans la répartition spatiale des populations, ainsi que leur incidence sur les structures éc...

La première édition de cet ouvrage, en 1988, s’était faite dans un contexte où les méthodes d’analyse et de mesure de la mobilité spatiale connaissaient un important regain d’intérêt, notamment de la part des gouvernements. L’urbanisation et les changements dans la répartition spatiale des populations, ainsi que leur incidence sur les structures éc...

La première édition de cet ouvrage, en 1988, s’était faite dans un contexte où les méthodes d’analyse et de mesure de la mobilité spatiale connaissaient un important regain d’intérêt, notamment de la part des gouvernements. L’urbanisation et les changements dans la répartition spatiale des populations, ainsi que leur incidence sur les structures éc...

Au fur et à mesure que les pays développés achèvent leur transition démographique, les problèmes de répartition et de distribution spatiale deviennent de plus en plus prépondérants. Simultanément l'urbanisation rapide dans les pays en développement posent de nombreux problèmes. Il en résulte une prise de conscience, tant des gouvernements que des c...

Il importe de voir qu'il s'agit de documents établis par les autorités politiques ou religieuses d'un pays en vue de déterminer les droits et les devoirs de chaque habitant. On peut cependant en tirer des renseignements statistiques. Certains pays publient des tableaux, issus de tels registres ou documents administratifs. Ces tableaux constituent u...

Si l'homme est mobile dans l'espace, nous avons indiqué que ses déplacements sont loin d'être aléatoires. Le suivi d'un individu tout au long de sa vie montrera des lieux fréquentés pendant de longues périodes, avec une régularité frappante. Par exemple on observera le départ de son lieu de résidence principale presque tous les matins, suivi d'un r...

Le recensement de la population constitue une autre source de données sur la mobilité. Si dans le passé les réponses à une question sur le lieu de naissance croisée avec le lieu de résidence fournissent l'essentiel de l'information censitaire sur les déplacements d'individus, un nouvel arsenal de questions est apparu dès la fin de la seconde guerre...

S'il existe déjà un grand nombre d'ouvrages présentant l'utilité ou même la nécessité d'utiliser des méthodes bayésiennes en sciences sociales et en statistiques, l'originalité de celui-ci se trouve dans l'application générale qu'il en propose pour la démographie et pour les projections de population. Notons cependant que de nombreux articles en st...

Alors que l'ouvrage de Bryant et Zhang (2019), précédemment analysé, prend clairement position pour des estimations et des projections démographiques Bayésiennes, cet ouvrage présente et discute de façon plus générale les projections aussi bien fréquentistes que probabilistes. Le premier chapitre, rédigé par les éditeurs de cet ouvrage, donne une p...

Many books have argued the usefulness, or even the necessity, of Bayesian methods in the social sciences and statistics. The originality of this volume is its presentation of the general application to demography and population projections. Nonetheless, numerous articles in statistics have already presented and discussed this topic, which is increa...

While Bryant and Zheng take a clear position in favour of Bayesian demographic estimates and projections, this book presents and discusses frequentist and probabilistic projections more generally. The first chapter, authored by the editors, offers a clear presentation of the differences between the various types of models, along with the main criti...

The ACMI captures the intensity of internal migration, measuring all changes of residential address in a given interval. The MEI, which ranges from 0 to 100, quantifies the balance between regional flows and counterflows, with low values indicating largely reciprocal exchanges between regios, and high values suggesting strongly directional flows. Y...

Presentation of the artistic work of Daniel Courgeau

In the last decade, social sciences have experienced a renewed interest in research on elites and power, as is testified to by a series of studies and publications. Targeting researchers in the field as well as master’s and doctoral students, this book contributes to this research by focusing on how elite studies theoretically and methodologically...

The two components of biodemography are: Biology is the science of life and of living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution. Demography is the statistical study of populations, especially human beings. Could such a mix be possible? Can it lead to a new science? Or may biology only bring to de...

According to historical sources and historian's studies, the Merovingian period (late 5th, early 8th century) was a disturbed period. Abandonment of rural settlements peaked in the 6th century and was associated with a population decline and a deep reshaping of settlement and land use between the 6th and early 8th centuries. It is possible to detec...

Biodémographie : évolution depuis 20 ans. La parution en 1996 de l’ouvrage édité par Jean-Pierre Bocquet Appel, Denise Pumain et moi-même sur l’Analyse spatiale de données biodémographiques, ouvrait au lecteur français une nouvelle approche scientifique. Elle s’est rapidement développée par la suite, en particulier auprès d’auteurs américains. Nou...

Biodemography: 20 years of evolution. The publication in 1996 of the volume, edited by Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, Denise Pumain and myself on: Spatial analysis of biodemographic data, opened to the French readers a new scientific approach. It quickly developed in the following years, in particular among U.S. researchers. We will try here first to...

La edad civil, como dato cuantitativo, se encuentra en la base de los estudios demográficos desde que los primeros demógrafos establecieron, hace más de tres siglos, la relación entre la mortalidad y la edad. El uso privilegiado de esta variable a la hora de observar y analizar todos los fenómenos demográficos deja suponer que la edad civil es el d...

Chronological age is a key quantitative variable that has been exploited by demographers since a link between mortality and age was first established more than three centuries ago. Its use as a variable of choice for the analysis of all demographic phenomena suggests that chronological age is the determinant of all demographic behaviours. However,...

The proposed book “Empirical Investigation of the Social Space” comprises 27 chapters from leading international experts working within the framework of Bourdieu’s empirical approach. This book concentrates on his empirical work, especially on the construction of the social space. The book also includes chapters on the concept of the habitus, which...

Some disciplines—of questionable scientific nature but still practiced today—claim that at least certain aspects of a person’s future life can be predicted before it unfolds. Indeed, the obsession with the future has been present since the very origin of humanity, and all the methods for predicting it have been tried. Even today, despite scientific...

Donnée quantitative, l'âge civil est à la base de la démographie depuis que les premiers démographes ont établi, il y a plus de trois siècles, le lien entre mortalité et âge. L'utilisation privilégiée de cette variable dans l'exploitation et la mise en lumière de tous les phénomènes démographiques peut laisser entendre que l'âge civil est le déterm...

A model-based demography is a new approach to better understand human populations. It investigate the interactions between various population systems, as well as the functional mechanisms behind them. The interactions and mechanisms are best described by formal models based on data and theory-based rules, derived from observations of system propert...

We are giving here an historical view of the fight against smallpox. It starts from the beginning of the XVIIIth century, when the medications prescribed by Rhazes from 910 were still applied. However an approach by inoculation, which was supposed to permit everybody to avoid the contagion, begins to develop. We show its evolution in England, New-E...

The central concern of this book is with the role and status of theory in demography. It gives a very deep overview of the importance of model-based demography, compared with the usual logical empiricism followed in this discipline. While these papers were written during a long period of time (the past three decades), they develop a new, original,...