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<section class="ark-wrap ark-prose">
  <h1>About Myrdal</h1>
  <p class="ark-lede">Myrdal is a demography and migration dataset, published as a site so the series can be read, charted and taken away. It is named for <strong>Gunnar Myrdal</strong> (1898–1987), whose <em>An American Dilemma</em> (1944) made a national question answerable with evidence, and whose idea of cumulative causation held that advantage and disadvantage compound through a region's population rather than correcting themselves.</p>

  <h2>The thesis</h2>
  <p>Population structure is not a slow-moving backdrop to economics; it is one of its causes. Who can
  work and who must be supported is set by age structure decades before it shows up in a fiscal
  projection. Where people are is set by migration, which moves labour and demand between places
  simultaneously. How many there will be is set by fertility and mortality that responded to conditions
  a generation earlier. Myrdal assembles the measured series behind those three forces from named
  statistical sources, and keeps their seams visible, so the demography in an economic argument can be
  checked rather than assumed.</p>

  <h2>In scope</h2>
  <ul>
    <li>Population levels and age structure, by country and by United States county</li>
    <li>The demographic transition — fertility, mortality, life expectancy</li>
    <li>Dependency ratios, youth and old-age</li>
    <li>Migration: international migrant stock and net migration; United States internal flows</li>
    <li>Nativity and the foreign-born share</li>
    <li>Long-run historical population, from year 1 of the common era</li>
    <li>Race and ethnicity counts as published by the Census Bureau, as population composition</li>
  </ul>

  <h2>Out of scope</h2>
  <ul>
    <li>Income and wealth distribution — that is a sibling site's subject, not this one's</li>
    <li>Health outcomes and health systems beyond the mortality and life-expectancy measures that
      define the demographic transition</li>
    <li>Labour-market outcomes beyond the labour-force and unemployment counts that describe
      population composition</li>
    <li>Immigration policy and political commentary</li>
    <li>Population forecasting of our own. Where a publisher issues projections they are shown as that
      publisher's projections, kept apart from observations, and never extended by us</li>
  </ul>
  <p class="ark-fineprint">This boundary is written down, in full, in the site's focus specification, so
  drift can be audited rather than argued about. It is a draft awaiting the owner's ratification.</p>

  <h2>How to read the counts</h2>
  <p>{{ meta.counts.series_registered }} series are registered and {{ meta.counts.series_published }}
  are published — those two happen to be equal here, because nothing is withheld. They are still
  reported as two numbers, because on a sibling site they are not equal, and a count that silently
  merges the two teaches a reader the wrong thing. Of those,
  {{ meta.counts.series_with_data }} have at least one data row and
  {{ meta.counts.series_chartable }} can be charted. The differences are explained on
  <a href="/methodology">Methodology</a>, one series at a time.</p>

  <p class="ark-fineprint">An <a href="{{ hub_url }}">Arcanum Research</a> project, built on the Anu
  Framework. Architect: <a href="{{ author_url }}">nickanderson.us</a>. Educational and research
  dataset; cite per <a href="/downloads/CITATION.cff">CITATION.cff</a>; terms in
  <a href="/downloads/TERMS.md">TERMS.md</a>.</p>
</section>
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