Demography: Past, present, and future

This collection of vignettes, the second in a series of four collections to appear in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in the year 2000, explores the interdigitation of statistics with business and social science. The 10 vignettes in the collection cover a broad range of methodologies and applications. The collection opens with vignettes on finance and marketing, followed by a series of methodologically focused vignettes on times series and forecasting, contingency tables, and causal inference. Attention then moves to disciplines, with coverage of political science, psychology, sociology, demography, and the law. The reader of this collection should gain an appreciation for the history and role of statistical thinking and methodology in the evolution of studies in business and social science, and for the considerable promise that exists for continued innovations at the interstices of statistics and these fields of inquiry.