ABSTRACT
How large the upcoming generation will be is the most important single question of demography. Births statistics provide an indication of this-at least each year’s births measure the size of the new cohort as it starts through life. Because it is subject to mortality as it gets older, measuring the sizes of the generations over time is more informative if one displays not exactly the births, but the births less the deaths of those dying young. We would want to subtract at least the infant deaths from the births, they having no influence on the size of the current generation when it reaches adulthood, nor the size of the one that will descend from it, and similarly to subtract the deaths between infancy and the age when reproduction starts, plus indeed some of the deaths that take place during the ages of reproduction.
