Ian Pool, 1936-2022

I was very saddened to hear of the passing of Ian Pool at the end of last month. I have held off on posting about this, waiting for a good obituary to show up online. I was not to be disappointed - Stuff published a beautiful obituary by Brian Easton earlier today. For those who don't know, Ian Pool is widely regarded as the founding father of New Zealand demography. He set up the Population Studies Centre (PSC) at the University of Waikato, which remains a national centre of excellence in demography and population studies (in its latest incarnation, renamed as Te Ngira - Institute for Population Research). Ian was well known for his work on African demography, as well as Māori demography, among many other contributions to the field.

I had many interactions with Ian over the years, including as a co-author and a co-researcher. When I first met him, sometime in the mid-2000s, I was working as a research assistant for Jacques Poot at the PSC, and completing my PhD in economics. Ian initially struck me as one of those infuriating people who have the habit of constantly name-dropping famous people they have met. However, Ian's name-dropping wasn't merely a cynical attempt to big-note himself - he really did know and had closely interacted with Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, and others. And I have to admit feeling a bit of a warm glow some years later when Ian name-checked me in a seminar or presentation (more than once) for my work on stochastic population projections.

My interactions with Ian also resulted in what is possibly one of the big missed opportunities of my career. Ian was very keen to have me work on a new research idea, distributional national accounts. I was mildly interested, but didn't have the time to devote to it immediately. I also had other priorities, especially in trying to establish a longitudinal ageing study based at Waikato (an initiative that eventually proved to be a dead end, as despite a lot of positive end-user engagement, we couldn't secure sufficient funding to make the study feasible). Anyway, I hadn't realised at the time just how important the idea of distributional national accounts was to become, as well as its centrality to the work of Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and others. Distributional national accounts were also a key contribution to the work of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, co-chaired by Stiglitz, Fitoussi, and Durand, as noted in the book Measuring What Counts (which I reviewed here). Ian was at the cutting edge, but sadly, I don't believe that he did find someone to work on New Zealand's distributional national accounts.

I was never a student of Ian's, but I did sit in on a workshop that he gave some years ago, on how to derive and interpret life tables. He was an excellent communicator, and clearly would have been a great teacher and mentor to students at all levels. I have had the pleasure of working with a number of his excellent former PhD and graduate students, including Natalie Jackson and Tahu Kukutai. I'm sure that a more complete roll call of Ian's students would reveal just how much of an impact he has had, and continues to have, on population studies and demography both in New Zealand and internationally.

Aside from his research contributions, Ian was just a lovely, generous, and sincere man. He was patient and kind to colleagues and students alike, and a fountain of knowledge on many things. He will be greatly missed.