Nationality United States Name Louis Dublin | Role Statistician | |
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Books The money value of a man, The facts of life, To be, or not to be, After eighty years | ||
Louis Israel Dublin (November 1, 1882 – March 7, 1969) was a Jewish American statistician. As vice president and statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, he promoted progressive and socially useful insurance underwriting policies. As a scholar, Dublin was an important figure in the establishment of demography as a social-scientific discipline in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Dublin was interested in eugenics but as a Jew of recent immigrant extraction criticized eugenicists for equating biological superiority with Nordic origins.
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Dublin was born in Kovno (Kaunas is the Lithuanian name for Kovno), Lithuania. He came to the U.S. in 1886 with his parents Max and Sarah (Rosensweig). Dublin obtained his bachelor's in 1901 at City College of New York. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1904. He married Augusta Salik on April 5, 1908. Dublin taught at Yale as a lecturer in vital statistics. In 1916 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 1924 served as president of the American Statistical Association.
He died in Winter Park, Orange County, Florida at the age of 86
Body Mass Index
While serving as a vice president at Met Life Insurance and as a statistician Dublin developed a height for weight table based on longevity of life insurance holders in the early 1940s. These tables would later develop into the Body Mass Index developed by University of Minnesota's pioneering cholesterol and heart disease physiology researcher Ancel Keys in 1972. Keys intended the BMI to be used only for the study of groups and not to be applied to individuals. The index is statistically very limited in usefulness as covered a very limited demographic of people who were able to afford life insurance and who were mostly white.