demography

“I don’t understand how illuminating them is going to be advantageous to Republicans,” said Jennifer Van Hook, a sociology and demography professor at Pennsylvania State University.

“No city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture,” said Reyner Banham, the British architectural historian who wrote about Los Angeles a half-century ago.

The paper is not only a critical analysis of blue zones, but a plea against the whole field of extreme-age demography.

Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who specialises in Latino voting trends, told the BBC that the problem with “demography is destiny” was that it risked treating all non-white Americans as an “aggrieved racial minority”.

Declining fertility rates are not just about people delaying parenthood, but about a growing trend of people not having children, says Brienna Perelli-Harris, professor of demography at the University of Southampton.