Professor Richard (Dick) Easterlin passed away on 16 December, 2024, aged 98.
His association with IUSSP began in 1962 when he became a member of the Union. In 2010, he received the IUSSP Laureate Award in recognition of “his many path-breaking contributions to population sciences, his dedication to opening the field of population sciences to all disciplines, his direct and indirect influence on generations of population sciences scholars, and his efforts to bring the lessons of population research to as wide an audience as possible.” He was an outstanding scholar, an out-of-the-box thinker, an inspiring teacher and mentor, and a good friend.
Professor Easterlin received his undergraduate degree in Engineering as well as a master’s degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology. He went on to study for an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania, and made the fortunate – for us -- decision to switch to economics and received a PhD there in 1953. He was a Professor of Economics at Penn for thirty years, appointed in 1978 to the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship in Economics. He subsequently (1982) moved to the University of Southern California where he served as a University Professor and Professor of Economics, and at the time of his death, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Early on, Professor Easterlin accepted Simon Kuznets’ view that “the touchstone of achievement is insight into empirical reality.” This basic belief has shaped everything Professor Easterlin has done since his graduate days. In a 1997 article he described his research approach: “I see the point of departure of research as some empirical problem… One is likely to have some theoretical preconceptions about causation, but the first step is to establish the facts, both quantitative and qualitative. These facts will inform the investigator more fully about what needs to be explained, and may also suggest new possibilities regarding causation. Economic theory enters by providing a systemic framework for theorizing, but other disciplines may suggest relevant causal factors that need to be included, and supply relevant facts. Simple empirical methods provide an initial check on the consistency of the theory and data; more rigorous methods are used largely to formalize one’s conclusions. Qualitative evidence….should be consistent with the model.” Dick adhered throughout his career to this multidisciplinary approach, drawing on the work of demographers, public health scholars, historians, and anthropologists.
Here are some of his most well-known contributions to population sciences.
In his earliest work on U.S. fertility, he accepted, as did all economists, that preferences were fixed and that fertility was a function of prices and income. However, he concluded that the data were inconsistent with such an explanation. For the answer, he turned to sociology and the concept of economic socialization and reference group theory (he was also influenced by the work of demographers on fertility preferences). He came to the heretical notion that preferences were not fixed and from that to the notion of “relative income”(one’s assessment of earnings prospects in relation to an internalized norm of one’s desired living level). Behavior was affected by relative income, not by absolute income as a friend and colleague of Professor Easterlin’s from his NBER days (Gary Becker) believed. This insight led to a compelling explanation of the baby boom and prediction of the baby bust in Professor Easterlin’s classic 1961 paper in the American Economic Review, “The American Baby Boom in Historical Perspective”. The “Easterlin hypothesis” was born. Over the years he and other scholars applied the concept to the study of many other behaviors (marriage, divorce, education, homicide, suicide, etc). The most notable presentation of the wide applicability of the Easterlin hypothesis to a myriad of behaviors was in Professor Easterlin’s remarkable 1978 PAA Presidential address. There has been a huge literature testing the Easterlin hypothesis and refining and extending it. Professor Easterlin contributed to this literature perhaps most notably in 1987’s Birth and Fortune where he laid out many refinements to the original hypothesis.
The “synthesis framework” (with Eileen Crimmins building on earlier work with Wachter and Pollak) is yet another notable contribution to population sciences. When he first sought to explain the demographic transition, he like other economists sought the answer in a model of conscious choice. This approach was inconsistent with a large literature in demography that suggested that prior to the transition most couples did not consciously regulate fertility. Rather than reject this evidence as “unimportant”, Easterlin and his collaborators incorporated it into their model. From here, Professor Easterlin realized that social norms and physiological relationships could be important in explaining the demographic transition. Most economists rejected the notion of desired family size. Professor Easterlin did not and incorporated desired fertility (a demographic concept) into his model. Thus was born the “synthesis framework” that took into account systematic changes in preferences and the existence of natural fertility (supply-side considerations), This supply-demand framework suggested that the determinants of fertility shift from supply to demand in the course of the demographic transition. The framework has been applied to help explain the demographic transition in many countries.
Early in his career, Professor Easterlin worked on happiness, not a topic common in modern economics, or, indeed, elsewhere. He returned to this topic in recent works and again added fresh insights. The accepted wisdom was that higher income leads to greater subjective welfare (happiness). But Professor Easterlin used the relative income concept to argue that aspirations rise as an economy develops, so that the positive effect of income growth on material welfare will be negated by the adverse effect of increased aspirations. His 2021 book, An Economist’s Lessons on Happiness: Farewell, Dismal Science! brings together his many years of research into the nature of human happiness, delving into factors shaping well-being, and emphasizing that happiness must be explained by factors beyond economic prosperity.
Aside from the IUSSP Laureate award, Prof Easterlin has received many honours (too many to list here). Among these, he was an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Econometric Society, was President of the Population Association of America, and was recognized by awards from the International Society for Quality of Life Studies, the Institute for the Study of Labor, the Population Association of America.
Along with this distinguished research contribution, Professor Easterlin’s record as a teacher has been equally distinguished. He has inspired generations of students from both developed and developing countries to widen their thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries and to integrate concepts from other disciplines – anthropology, economics, history, sociology – to better understand human behavior. Those who have been privileged to attend his classes can vouch for his commitment to his students, his generous mentoring, and the way he encouraged students to question his ideas and express their own. Many of the world’s leading demographers have passed through Professor Easterlin’s classroom and have been influenced by his thinking.
We mourn the loss of a visionary while celebrating the life of a person who has played a unique and special role in furthering the field and has touched many lives in many ways.
Prof Easterlin is survived by his wife, USC Professor Eileen Crimmins; children Dan, Nancy, Sue, Andy, Matt and Molly; and grandchildren Zack, Emma, Keaton, Tyler, Ryder, Owen, Ada, Enzo and Clio, who was born less than two months after his passing. We share their loss.
By Shireen Jejeebhoy, drawing also on the tribute paid to Prof Easterlin on his receipt of the IUSSP Laureate award in 2010.